


The Wild, Wild West

by BlindSwandive



Series: The Wild, Wild West [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Breathplay, Brother Feels, But some boundaries are crossed, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Choking, Conduit Fic, Corsetry, Costume Kink, Curvy girls too, D/s overtones, Dean Doth Protest Too Much, Dean Winchester Has Trust Issues, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internalized Gender Issues, Internalized Homophobia, It's not gay if, Kink Negotiation, Multi, No Actual Wincest, No clear resolution, Post-Purgatory Dean Winchester, Pre-Slash, Redheads are crazy, Rough Sex, Saloon girls are still hot, Sam Winchester Has Secrets, Season/Series 08, Sexual Roleplay, Smoking, Spitroasting, Threesome - F/M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, We know where this is heading but we're not there yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 01:30:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17778020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: Still raw from Purgatory and Amelia, Dean and Sam pick up a couple of cases out in central California that bring up some unresolved issues.  Along the way, Dean picks up a girl who may or may not be involved in the mess, but who definitely seems to think a devil's threesome would be a good idea.  Cue kinky sex, angry ghosts, suspicion, sexual confusion, blurred boundaries, and some loose ends.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set mid-season 8, after finding the bunker but before starting the trials. This was supposed to be a straightforward kinky conduit fic that could do double-duty with bringing the Winchesters out west to a neglected part of California, but they had other ideas and proved just as stubborn and headstrong as Winchesters can be. This is the first story in a series that will eventually feature Soulless!Sam, Demon!Dean, and if somebody stops playing their cards so close to their chest, some Wincest, but for now it's very much just Dean/OFC and Dean/OFC/Sam. All stories in the series should stand alone so if one isn't your cup of tea you should be fine to stop anywhere or skip stories.
> 
> Endless thanks to the amazing [Alyndra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alyndra/) for encouragement, round after round of fabulous betaing and not letting me get away with sloppy OC use. Every remaining issue is completely on me, especially anything that's too obscure for its own good. There are a lot of hints about a lot of things that just never quite see the light of day, here.
> 
> Feedback is love.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013  
1:38pm, 71˚F  
Columbia, CA

"Sam—Sammy!" Dean gripped his brother's arm until he dragged to a reluctant stop. "They've got a saloon!"

The wide dirt road between the purportedly historic buildings was quiet and mostly empty, and the temperature had been climbing up steadily into what was uncomfortably warm for January. Under the clear sky and bright sun their white shirts were starting to stick to their skin, and their cheap black dress shoes were going beige in the dust. Something cold and, preferably, alcoholic would go a long way towards healing Dean's discontent with the absurdity that was the California winter.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Yes, Dean, they've got a saloon. There have been four saloons, so far. Do you—" And here, Sam laid a hand on Dean's shoulder, a parody of brotherly concern, "Do you seriously not remember what we learned in Sunrise, Wyoming? About _real_ saloons? And _real_ saloon girls? Are you really just ready to jump right back into that mess?"

Dean swallowed down the memory and accompanying bitter taste. "You—Shut up. Anyway, it's not a 'real' saloon. Nothing about this place is real. It's—it's practically LARPing for Yosemite Sam. They're banking on tourists being idiots and shelling out their money to—to—I don't know, pan for gold and drink sarsaparilla."

"Because you didn't immediately order a sarsaparilla in Sunrise," Sam sotto voced. 

Dean lightly swatted his arm. "You said that was good. Don't pretend that wasn't good."

"Dean," Sam sighed, "we're here to work, not to play cowboys or miners or whatever it is you want to do."

"I'm working," Dean insisted. "Maybe someone who works in the saloon can tell us something that, uh, the squares in the general store left out." He was proud of that excuse and indulged a pleased little smirk and a wag of his eyebrows. "Bartenders talk to everybody."

"Right," Sam said, nodding slowly. "And the fact that the bartender is a redhead has nothing to do with it?"

"Right," Dean agreed, stoically, slightly loosening his tie.

"And it has nothing to do with the fact that you can tell _from here_ that her—" he lowered his voice, " _'décolletage'_ is on display?"

"Nope. Not a thing." Dean clapped his hands together and rubbed them once. _"'Décolletage,'"_ he repeated thoughtfully under his breath, trying out the word on his tongue. It was fun. He waited for Sam to look some other direction before squinting through the dingy glass to try to get a better look. 

Sam closed his eyes. He was wearing his "counting to ten to keep from hitting Dean" face, but Dean figured that meant he was winning, so he pushed through. "Anyway, if you think it'll be a bust, why don't you just, uh, go check out the theater or the hotel or something, and I'll go see what dirt they're dishing at the watering hole?"

"Fine," Sam muttered. Dean slapped him fondly on the shoulder and tried to bolt before Sam could throw any excessively motherly warnings his way, but he was pretty sure he still heard something about STDs being just as common in the modern age as the Old West. He shook it off and gave what he hoped would be a suitably epic swing to the saloon doors as he stepped through.

A tiny thrill ran down his spine as his gait shifted unthinkingly into a swagger. He was sure he'd never admit it out loud, but there was something delicious about sinking into another era, trying on the parlance and the costume and the anonymity. Maybe he'd call himself Agent Wayne. Sam could be Agent O'Hara, comma, Maureen.

The woman behind the bar gave a particularly gravelly, "Afternoon, sugar," and Dean grinned, letting the touch of rough and raunch wash over him like the brush of fingertips, like the breath of a girl. He was just wishing he had a hat to tip to the lady when she asked, "Agent Mercury, wasn't it?" 

That brought Dean up short, as his inner world tripped over itself and thudded to a graceless halt.

***

_Two days earlier_

Sunday, 20 January 2013  
11:38 am, 59˚F  
Sonora, CA

Five miles and two days back down the road had been cooler but grimmer. The bodies that morning had been in a state the coroner could only describe as "looking like they'd popped," and even Dean's iron stomach had done a couple of somersaults when he'd seen for himself just how accurate that description was. And when they'd learned that the only connection so far between the victims was having visited the same craft fair earlier in the weekend, Dean had been ready to hang it up and gun it straight back to Kansas. 

Sam had talked him down, but Dean had still been making not-so-sly references to alien truthers and Sam just wanting to pick up more hippie tail all the way to the fairgrounds. Sam, for his part, was ruining the fun by staying maddeningly above it all and insisting on working the case. Bitch.

"So, what are you thinking, cursed object?"

Dean tilted his head side to side. "Or witchcraft. Gotta assume at least one of these biddies fancies herself a witch." He was side-eyeing every booth they passed, pretty sure the number of half-assed occult symbols being worn by the primarily female merchants outnumbered the merchants themselves 2:1. "We are never going to get the stink of incense out of these suits, you realize."

Sam nodded thoughtfully, still ignoring the baiting. "But there's a long way between dancing skyclad and actually wielding enough power to cause the kind of damage we saw back at the morgue."

Dean gave him a "fair enough" shrug of eyebrows, and began to train his eyes down to the tables and tents displaying jewelry and medicine bags, instead of the purveyors.

"Look, there's a lot of ground to cover here," Sam said, "why don't we split up? I'll take the north side, you take the south."

Dean nodded tersely. "You know me, if I can't go south, no one can."

Sam frowned and raised one eyebrow skeptically, but just turned and picked a vendor.

The gossip was rampant—everyone had heard that two visitors had died not long after leaving the fair—but information that was actually useful was next to nil. There were the odd petty rivalries and sore spots (two potters in a paranoid tug-of-war, a leather-working couple on the outs and now in separate booths, someone who painted animal portraits on wood whom no one else liked, and an eclectic crafter whom some people liked too much if-you-know-what-they-meant), but no one could fathom why anyone would ever take out paying customers. Everyone was afraid it would be bad for business, and most were more than a little spooked. Dean left his card with the half a dozen who seemed less unreliable than the others, but didn't hold out much hope for a call. He caught Sam's eye, but Sam shrugged at him and indicated with a point that he was going back the other direction to pick up the vendors he'd missed on his side, so Dean looked for somewhere likely to stop and indulge in a little quiet sulking.

Dean had been aching to get out of the bunker. He liked it there; he was trying to make a home of it, and it was starting to take. But just the same, the old itch kept creeping up his spine and down his fingers, the itch of a year of nothing but running and fighting and killing, in Purgatory, the itch of the easy grace of violence without consequence, the thrill of being alive and only barely at that. Getting out and onto a case had seemed like the only way to scratch it. But there had been no convenient nests, no mindless slavering monsters to hunt and bleed and destroy in some spectacularly gory fashion. No; there had only been a string of maybe-cases and barely-worth-its that had led them further and further into the western frontier until they had almost run out of frontier entirely. 

Now he felt just as restless, only here he didn't even have the benefit of the anchor of home. The bodies that looked like something out of the bathroom scene from _It_ had seemed promising, but had left them playing FBI more than hunting. He wanted a fight; he wanted a drink; he wanted to screw. He didn't want to make nice with middle-aged women who read tarot cards and cast runes and had no idea what in the world they were brushing up against.

"Rest your bones, sugar?"

Dean closed his eyes and consciously clenched and unclenched his fists twice before he was certain he could keep his Fed face on. When he turned toward the sound, he saw a woman with a violently red tangle of hair and an unlit cigarillo hanging out of the side of her mouth, wearing a caftan and too many scarves. She was shorter and wider than he tended to go for, and she was working a craft fair so that was two strikes against her, but her tattoos looked like they were real, rather than henna'd, and her voice sounded like she tended to start her day with bourbon and cigars, so he reasoned she might not be all bad and cautiously came to sit on the empty stool beside hers.

Her feet were bare in the grass, one slowly pedaling a spinning wheel so old he wanted to burn it on principle (if it hadn't cursed Sleeping Beauty yet, it was a matter of time). He didn't think he'd ever actually seen one being used, before, and as the graceless wads of—fluff?—wound themselves impossibly into silvery thread, he wrote it off as witchcraft.

"Thanks, ma'am, very kind of you." Slipping his false ID from his inside pocket and giving it the practiced flip open for just not quite long enough to be really useful, he introduced himself. "Agent Mercury, FBI. Do I, uh, have to guess your name to get you to spin me some gold on that thing?" He grinned at his own cleverness and winked, but she didn't look up to see it.

She smiled, though, and the freckles by the corners of her eyes were lost in the crinkle of crow's feet. "I'm supposed to spin you the gold first," she corrected, taking the cigarillo from her lips into two fingers as though it were actually lit, without pausing in feeding the wheel. "After that, I get your firstborn child if you can't guess it. High stakes, Mr. Mercury, might not be the kind of deal you're looking for."

The back of Dean's neck prickled cold. For a moment, it didn't matter that he'd started the riff himself; the thought of his brother sold out to a demon before he was even conceived still had the power to make some young, scared thing inside of him start to panic. Without thinking, Dean sniffed the air for sulfur, tried to get a look at the spinner's eyes, but she kept them down on the wheel, apparently unaware of the damage she'd done.

"Some water in the jug under that table, Mr. Mercury," she said, easy, "cups, too. Help yourself."

Dean didn't want to miss a chance to spy something untoward, so he forcibly pulled himself together and turned to reach under the batik fabric hanging over the table. He wasn't all that surprised to find a half-empty fifth of Jameson's lying on its side next to the sweating ceramic jug of water and almost took some of that instead, but wasn't sure she'd actually like to have the evidence of her casual alcoholism outed. Maybe later. He poured himself a little water just to have something to do while he scanned the ground under the table for anything occult. Nothing was jumping out at him, though, so he cleared his throat and sat up.

"Mrs. Uh…?"

"Mizz," she purred. "Anyway, I thought we were going to have a game of you guessing." She lifted her eyes to him briefly (they were green—very, very green—not black or yellow).

"'Miss,'" he said carefully, "not that it's not, uh, fascinating watching you do that voodoo there, but I'm actually here to ask about Rachael Mayer and Mark Silva."

Her smile faded entirely. "Is that—are they the ones who…?"

"Popped." Dean nodded. "Grisly business. Did, uh, either of them happen to come by your setup here, Friday morning?"

She shook her head, but looked uncertain. "Don't actually know. I don't tend to get names unless someone buys with a card or signs the guestbook." She stopped pedaling, then, and draped the fingers of one hand over the wheel until it slid to an abrupt and hissing halt, dropping the silvery unspun mass carelessly to the ground as she stood. "Let me check." She reached across the opposite table for an absurd guestbook, all leaves and flowers, flopping it open onto Dean's lap. She unearthed a cellphone from somewhere in her caftan, then, and its cover matched the book's; Dean tried not to roll his eyes, but she was too busy scrolling through the phone to notice, anyway.

"I'm not seeing either of those names," she said after a few long moments, and Dean wasn't either, so he handed back the book and produced a couple of (thankfully) "before" photos they'd managed to get a hold of. 

"Can you tell me if either of them look familiar? Maybe you didn't get a name, but they stopped to talk?"

The spinner wiped her hands roughly on her hips and slid on a pair of ancient looking half-moon spectacles before taking the pictures gingerly. To her credit, she actually seemed to be taking the time to really look at them, but her head was shaking slowly as she did.

"Maybe," she said, finally. "I'm really not sure." She sounded genuinely regretful, and handed the photos back.

"I'll give you my card in case anything comes to mind," Dean said, evenly, sliding them back into his pocket. "Hey, maybe you can help me out with something else…"

"Shoot," she said, sitting back down on her stool.

Dean schooled his face carefully to suggest interest and non-judgment. "Have you noticed anything odd, this weekend?"

Her eyebrows arched in disbelief. 

"Odder than… normal, for this kind of thing," Dean amended hastily. "Maybe there've been strange smells, sounds?" he prompted with practiced ease. 

He thought for moment she looked a little grey, but she recovered and shook her head. "No. The usual incense, some good leather and wood varnish, a little grass. Both kinds," she added, with a trace of humor. "Hasn't even been any Tule fog, what with the drought. No smells that… shouldn't be here," she finished, delicately, and Dean thought she'd maybe chosen her words a little too carefully. 

"No sulfur, then," he prompted baldly, watching her closely for a reaction. 

There was a half second, then, when Dean thought the spinner was going to lunge at him. He stood aside on reflex, so fast that he knocked over the stool he'd been seated on, but she turned out to only be dropping to her hands and knees, fishing under the table behind him.

She didn't even bother getting off the ground, when she'd retrieved her prize, just sat back on the grass with her feet planted and her knees pulled up as she poured herself a shot of whiskey into a paper cup.

Dean righted his stool and sat again, slipping the bottle from her fingers without asking. He poured out his forgotten water into the grass and filled his own cup almost to the brim, watching her over it hawkishly. "So was that a yes or a no on the sulfur?"

"No sulfur," she responded, flatly. "No cold spots, nothing moving on its own, no strange eyes or…" She downed half her drink in one and hissed after the swallow. "Nothing like that," she finished, lamely. 

Dean nodded slowly, working on his own cup more judiciously. "And how is it you figured out those were going to be my next questions?"

The woman finished the cup in another gulp, pawing the bottle back from Dean for a refill. "Some bad business out in Stockton a few years back," she said, eventually, and though her voice was controlled enough, there was something muddy below the surface. "Some idiot thought it was a good idea to turn an abandoned mental hospital out there into a college campus, believe that?" She snorted, shaking her head, and the scarf in her hair started to come loose. "Everything was fine until it wasn't. I—" She paused, tightening her mouth into a stiff little purse before forcing her jaw to let go. "—'Helped the authorities with their inquiries,'" she finished, slowly turning the cup between her fingers. 

"And your country thanks you for your service," Dean said promptly, making a mental note to ask around about the case history on that. Sounded like the premise of a bad horror movie, but people had done stupider things. He got the feeling whatever hunter had been here before might not have left the cleanest taste in her mouth, though that wasn't unusual for hunters. "Are you sure you haven't seen anything here like you saw there?"

"Pretty sure," she said, turning a mirthless smirk toward Dean's shoes. "Kinda hard to miss a spontaneous evisceration."

Dean nodded, something sinking in his chest. He cast a glance out for Sam without meaning to, not quite able to pull his eyes back until he'd spotted a familiar head bobbing along over the rest of the crowd. He found he'd been doing that a lot, lately.

"Well," he said, finally turning back to finis his drink and fish out a business card, "if you do think of anything." He handed it down to her, and she took it wordlessly, sliding it away into one of the folds of fabric along with her phone. When he offered her his hand, to help her stand, she sighed silently and took it. He braced more than necessary, to help her up, and found her lighter than she looked; the top of her head came only up under his chin. Suddenly he had the ridiculous wish that Sam had interviewed her, instead, just to see him trying to hunch himself down to her level to appear nonthreatening. The thought made him grin, and he only realized it was inappropriate when she tilted her head at him curiously.

"Sorry," he mumbled, carefully forcing a serious expression. "Thank you for your time."

He did surreptitiously run his EMF detector over the pendants on one of her tables as he left her, but stuffed it away quickly when it refused to speak up. 

Dean hit up a few more vendors, but found them to a one singularly unhelpful, though he only barely restrained himself from playing with the wooden longswords and palming a deadly looking little iron knife he thought might come in handy someday. By the time he met up with Sam again, ready to leave the fairgrounds, he glanced back to find the spinner at her wheel, but with her glasses still on, eyes leveled on them, still and quiet. He was just getting ready to tag Sam, to report her as suspicious and to ask him if he knew anything about Stockton, when Sam pulled an evil looking pendant out of his pocket, holding it carefully out to display from the safety of a handkerchief. "Ta da." The wind went out of Dean's intention, and he let Sam explain what the hell he'd found.

Sam proceeded to tell him all about the woman at the end of the row who didn't seem to even know what she'd gotten her hands on, how she thought she'd "upcycled" the offending bauble in the center (whatever the hell that meant), how both of the vics had handled it long and strange before drifting away looking… wrong. He shared his fledgling theories on why the curse had bypassed the jeweler but attached to the victims, and a dozen other things Dean wasn't really listening to. Still, he slung his arm around Sam's shoulders in congratulations and mussed his hair, glad for an excuse to let the uneasy feeling slide off of his shoulders and to be done with Sonora once and for all.

***

Sam hadn't let him leave, though. It took most of the next day to figure out how to actually neutralize the cursed pendant (the center bauble was solid glass and seemed to find their attempts to smash it or get a fire hot enough to melt it laughable) and by the time they'd settled on just locking it away in a hex box, they'd gotten a call about a case a few miles away in some state historic park. Details were scarce, but best they could figure, a dull, everyday ghost tour had gone wrong when an actual ghost had shown up. No one had been hurt, but they didn't have anywhere else to be, so Sam said they might as well go check it out.

Dean had declared people, on the whole, to be idiots, who if they were dumb enough to go looking for ghosts deserved what they got when they found them, but Sam had pointed out a town just past it on the map called Angels Camp, and Dean had started laughing. The thought of Cass trying to set up a tent and go fishing the rivers was funny enough that he finally let Sam talk him into visiting it (and maybe doing a quick salt and burn on the way), and he supposed he wasn't actually missing the howling wind and teenage temperatures they'd left on the prairie all that much. Yet.

But then they'd spent the better part of the morning feeling like they were dragging through molasses, and no one was helpful, and everything smelled like sarsaparilla, and it had gotten downright hot for January, and he was sticky and he was dusty, and he was hurting to blow off some steam. The saloon, and the heave of an Old West bosom distorted through the warped glass, had felt like an oasis in the desert, and Dean had gotten the feeling there'd be an outlet of one sort or another in there for him soon. It was the first good thing that had happened to him in days.

But he hadn't expected for the saloon girl to act like she knew him. It was throwing him off his game. 

Dean cleared his throat and closed the distance slowly to buy time. Even dressed like the Feeb, he was pretty sure he had his best manly strut on and he worked it for all it was worth.

"Yes, ma'am. Agent Mercury, FBI." He flipped out his badge to cover how he was scanning her quickly against his mental Rolodex, looking for a match amidst a too-large field of one-night stands, none of which she seemed even vaguely to resemble. But once he was close enough that only the bar stood between them, he squinted under a knit brow. "Wait, are you—Rumplestiltskin?"

The spinner—and it had to be the spinner, those big eyes were unmistakable—gave him a little half-assed salute behind the bar.

"How are you here?" He waved a hand expansively to indicate the bar, the town. "What, first a haunted hospital in Stockton, then a cursed craft fair, and now Ghosts Gone Wild in the Old West? How many friggin' places do you work?"

She pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling, eyes darting back and forth like she were reading a ledger. "Regularly, seasonally, or this week?" she asked, eventually.

The way she'd tipped her head up showed off an absurdly tiny neck in a black velvet choker and the décolletage that had been such a beacon from the street. He wondered where the hell she'd been hiding it in Sonora. Under some kind of Craft Fair Camouflage, maybe. 

"How 'bout this week?" Dean said, hoping she'd keep looking at the ceiling and not at him. He wanted a leisurely look down her body. The sharp turn her wasp waist took, spilling up into an ample enough bosom but down into enormous hips, felt like a word problem in a high school math book, and he sucked at word problems. He couldn't make it jive with the shapeless mass he'd taken her for two days ago.

Unfortunately, she only mouthed on the air for a moment before giving up. "Too many," she said, finally, and sounded a little tired. 

Damn. 

"You, uh… you look different," he said, to fill the space, because she was giving him that same long, curious look he'd caught on the way out of the fair. It was too still, somehow. Patient. Hungry. 

That seemed to matter less when he could see her cleavage rising and falling with each breath she took, though.

She shrugged one shoulder. "Different clientele, different people to please. Jewelry circuit, I get to let my hair down and my seams out. Here, I get to drink and let out my tits, so..." There was a faint smile, and something wicked in her eyes. "Benefits and pitfalls to every job, right?"

Dean nodded. His involved frequent brushes with death, after all. 

"So is that uncomfortable?" he asked, gesturing to her midsection, mostly for the excuse it gave him to work on the geometry problem it posed.

"Mm," she said, vague. "Most people think they are. I think it beats the hell out of nylons."

Dean glanced further down; he was pretty sure there was a thin strip of fishnet between the green satin of her skirt and the soft-looking leather of her boots. Heat unrelated to the weather started to spread over his skin.

"Granted," she went on, apparently oblivious, "for authenticity's sake, I'd have it on under the rest, but tourists don't much care about authenticity. And I get a kick out of showing off the craftsmanship." She rapped her knuckles over one of the flat ridges over her ribs, eliciting a dull, wooden thwack.

Dean was caught up short. "That's—you made that?'

"One of my too-many jobs," she said, and this time her eyes were the ones drifting down, like she was sizing him up. She slid a lace fan out of her sleeve like some kind of sartorial magician, and flipped it open to fan herself lazily. "You ever try one on?" she asked, and the tip of her tongue just brushed out over her lower lip.

Dean's face flushed bright, all at once. "No, not really my thing."

"Pity."

Dean swallowed back the faint reflexive panic that had elicited and cleared his throat. Still, he was pretty sure that it was an attempt at flirting, odd though it was, and for Dean, flirting was like riding a bike. He caught his stride and took off. 

"You know, you never did give me your name," he said, leaning down onto his elbows on the bar to close some of the distance between them. And maybe a little bit to guard his midsection from whatever satiny, lacy designs she might have on it.

"Lucille Irene," she replied, rolling her eyes theatrically. "Lucy's fine. Lucille's fine. Just—please, no _I Love Lucy_ cracks." 

She absently patted at the complicated coif of curls, pins, feathers, and combs on top of her head, and Dean's eyes were drawn up to the motion. No wonder he hadn't recognized her, he thought; her hair had been more _Where the Wild Things Are_ than _Wild, Wild West_ before, and it was hard to see past hair like that.

Lucy turned away, then, letting her fingers fan over the world of delights behind the bar, and settled on a couple of shot glasses and a bottle. Dean's eyes caught on a kitschy sign a few feet away that said "Beware Pickpockets and Loose Women," and felt something delicious uncoil in his belly. He indulged himself in a long look down her backside.

"Nice bustle."

When she turned and set both glasses in front of him and began to pour, she winked. "No bustle. It's really just that big."

"That's not—" what I meant, he almost said, but took a chance he was reading her right. "—Not a bad thing," he finished instead, "not a bad thing at all." He grinned and raised the glass she'd nudged towards him, honoring her curve. "Y'know what they say, the bigger the cushion…"

"…the sweeter the pushin'," Lucille finished, eyebrows lifted appreciatively. She clinked his glass. 

They both drank quietly for a minute, eyeing one another appraisingly. "To tell the truth," she said, eventually, "I didn't take you for someone who went after the more Rubenesque amongst us. Thought you'd be into people with… slimmer hips." 

Dean knitted his brows, confused, but didn't stop smiling. "Where'd you get that idea? I mean, I'll admit, I've gone after my fair share of ballerinas. And gymnasts. Contortionists… Yoga teachers…"

"I do get the picture," Lucille murmured. 

"…So, yeah, I guess, usually," Dean admitted, a little surprised by the realization. There was a whole world of thin women with no hips and very, very large breasts spread out behind him. Huh. "But I'm a man of many interests," he insisted, magnanimous in his lust. "Seriously, how'd you peg that after ten minutes at a friggin' craft fair, anyway? I wasn't exactly on the prowl."

Lucille looked off, all feigned innocence. "Just the impression I got."

"In ten minutes?" Dean repeated.

"It was more that… after you left my pitch you joined back up at the hip with that willowy thing, with the John Lennon hair," she drawled into her drink. "Slim thing."

Dean's abdomen clenched. "That's—no. That is my _partner,_ " he emphasized. "My work partner, not—like that. And what's more, that is a man," he added, in case that weren't abundantly clear. "Which--I mean, that's fine," he backpedalled, "but not--for me, I mean." Why the hell was he tripping over his own tongue?

Lucille raised both palms disarmingly. "Sugar, it wouldn't be a problem for me either way. You asked why I thought that, and that's why I thought that. That's all."

Dean felt his face flushing and refused to acknowledge it in the mirror behind the bar. "See, that's not… how me and my partner roll. No funny business." His protests sound a little too forceful, even to his own ear. He took a deep breath, trying to smooth down his nerves.

Lucille rolled a shoulder dismissively, pouring herself another drink. "Like I said, nothing to me if you do or if you don't. You're on the front lines together, though, aren't you? You know what they say about foxholes."

The image of Annie—more specifically, of Annie with Dean, and Annie with Sam, and Annie with Bobby—came to mind, and he looked deeply into Lucy's décolletage to try to steamroll it out. "What, no atheists?"

"No heterosexuals, either," she responded drily. 

"Not familiar with that, uh, version of the quote," Dean said, as calmly as he could, which turned out to be not very. "And even if I were," he said, now lowering his voice to impart 'sensitive information', "my partner is also my brother. And I'm pretty sure there's nothing about _that_ in foxholes." _Q.E.D._

Lucille chuckled, refilling Dean's drink. He'd finished it all of a sudden, without quite realizing. He tucked into the next one rather faster than he meant to, too, but the subject was a little touchy, after all. Hopefully he'd put the nail in it.

"That's just fine," Lucille said, patting his hand, and Dean got the strangest feeling he was being condescended to. 

"Come on, you—you don't understand," he decided. "You must not have a brother."

"I do have," Lucille said. "And eventually he said I wasn't supposed to come around if I was wearing one of these." She ran a finger down the center join of her corset to indicate. "We're all just human, Mr. Mercury."

"Dean," he said, automatically, because the lower half of his body was still on board for getting this woman to take him home with her tonight. The top half, on the other hand, was beginning to have serious reservations, and wondered if he should start reeling back into something that could pass for professionalism so he didn't wind up out of his depth.

"Nice to meet you, Dean," she said, grasping one of his hands in one of hers, daintily, for a shake. 

Dean tried to drink to cover (or preferably, obliterate) his tension, but his mouth went on without his permission. He wasn't sure whose side it was on, anymore. "So you seriously—your own brother can't be around you when you're in that thing?"

"Can you blame him?" Lucille asked, indicating her grandeur with a lazy wave. "He'd never do anything about it, but beautiful is beautiful."

"You can't just…" Dean's head was spinning, and not from the whiskey. "It's just not done," he explained, simply, as if she were from some bizarre other world where she just hadn't heard about this yet. "It's wrong, pure and simple."

"Is it?" she asked, and now he got the impression she was setting a trap for him.

"Yes!" he said, forcefully, blundering forward into it anyway.

"So suppose there's some cute pair of girls," she said, then, lowering her voice conspiratorially, "twins, maybe. Pretty little blonde things, slim, arms around each other's shoulders… Tell me you never saw that and thought about slipping right in between them."

When he tried to open his mouth to deny it, the lie wouldn't come; it was too proud an achievement to dishonor that way. And he was pretty sure he was smiling at the memory, too. 

"Or that you wouldn't enjoy seeing them tangled up together, just a little," she pressed, and her smile was like a baited lure.

"But that's—that's different," Dean protested, even if he wasn't exactly sure how. "Twins is just… hot."

"Maybe so is two ravishing brothers," she replied warmly. "Or two brothers ravishing. Whichever."

Her fan began to swing a little faster, and Dean got the feeling that it wasn't for show. Her pale skin—scattered with freckles and beauty marks—was getting flushed. It looked like she was blushing all over.

Dean let his eyes slide down again, down as far as he could see, and back up again still more slowly. She watched him as he did it, this time, and seemed still and unbothered by it. He thought her pupils might have dilated, and her eyes were half-lidded.

"Well," he said, deliberately, and quite sensibly he thought, "if we're not talking ravishing each other, but more… say, ravishing someone in common…" He tipped his head side to side once, a little moue of consideration on his lips. Something was relaxing in his spine and in his head; they'd diverted around the worst of the danger, and he could be pretty broad-minded outside of that. Especially after two whiskeys. Especially to make a hot girl happy. "Guess I can't see anything wrong with that."

"Nn-nm," she agreed, and it was low in her chest again. Her breasts were rising and falling a little more rapidly, he noticed, and he almost spared a thought to wonder how she could breathe in that thing, but it slipped away just as fast. 

"Wouldn't call that a, uh, first date kind of maneuver, though," he admitted. "Kinda hard to spring on someone, no notice, no forewarning."

"Fair point," Lucille murmured, and without missing a beat, "how long you in town?" And it sounded like rocks, like the growl of the Impala's engine coming to life.

Sweet Jesus. "Depends on how long it takes to put our case to bed," he said, shrugging and trying to press down the swell of eagerness in his gut. Maybe it would take a few days. A few nights…

Lucille nodded. "Figured you were here on business. You flashed that badge pretty quick when you came in."

Shit. Right. Dean sighed silently and surreptitiously adjusted himself through his slacks under the cover of the bar.

"Right. Right," he repeated, clearing his throat and sitting up a little straighter. "And you're working, though—" Dean looked around, only now noticing that the place was deserted. "—Guessing Tuesday afternoons in January's not the biggest tourist time around here."

"You'd be guessing right," she agreed. "Usually we get at least a few of the locals come down to shoot pool and have a pint over their lunch break, but they cleared out pretty quick today. Figure people are a little rattled about the tour going sideways this weekend."

And there it was—that little chink in her oh-so-casual armor when the supernatural came up. Before she'd even finished saying it, she'd picked up a rag and started mopping up behind the bar, in spite of there not being anything particularly worth mopping up that Dean could see.

"Yeah," he said, a little reluctantly, "about that."

"Not sure I can help," Lucille said, studiously lining up glasses. "You saw where I was all weekend."

"Sure," Dean agreed, "but somebody must have come in here eager to spill the gossip, right? Girl like you, people probably stop by just falling all over themselves to tell you their secrets, trying to impress you."

"Flattery will get you everywhere," she said, with more sincerity than he'd ever heard someone say it before, but she still looked a little scattered. "No one's come in to see me who was actually part of the tour, so far, but everyone who has come in has had a theory," she said, the "for whatever that's worth" implied by her tone. "Jeff Merganser said it must be a miner who died when a shaft collapsed on him, Michael Cullen said it's a brothel girl who got killed by her father when he found out what she was doing with herself, Alan Colbert thinks it's all a ploy by the tour company to drum up business and nothing really happened at all… There's pretty much as many theories as there are drunks to come up with them."

"Ain't that always the way?" Dean commiserated. "Any of the theories strike you as more plausible than the others?"

Lucille looked a little harried, shook her head. "Few years ago, I'd've said it was a hoax gone wrong, for sure, but… nothing seems too far-fetched, anymore. Sure been enough violent deaths in this town in a hundred and sixty-some years for one of them to go sour."

"Ain't that always the way," Dean repeated, sighing. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he slipped it out. "Will you excuse me for a moment?"

She dismissed him with a wave and started straightening bottles. Lucille needed a step-stool—with two steps—to reach the top-shelf liquor. When she climbed it, Dean got another look at her fishnets and high-heeled leather boots. There was a mean looking little dagger tucked into one.

"This better be good, Sam," he muttered threateningly as he dragged himself away from the view and over to one of the pool tables.

"Sorry to interrupt you." He didn't sound it, and Dean flipped him the bird in absentia. "May have something. The guy who leads the tour has actually catalogued the local 'personalities' pretty extensively, and it sounds like they're mostly just shades and echoes rather than vengeful spirits, but he said the thing that came at them Saturday wasn't one of his regulars. He was pretty sure it was a woman, and he referred to her as a… painted lady."

"That mean what I think it does?"

"If you think it means prostitute, then, yes."

"Heard something about a—a 'painted lady' dying bloody, see if I can get something on that." Dean glanced back to see Lucille sneak a cherry from the garnishes. The stem disappeared into her mouth after the fruit and he felt his eyes roll up a little ways into his skull. Focus, Dean. "He say where she turned up?"

"Yep, second floor of the Fallon Hotel."

"Fallon," Dean repeated, to commit it to memory. "All right, you head down there and I'll meet you in a few."

"Actually, I got a bead on a local historian and I was going to go see what they knew, can you take the hotel?"

Dean silently pumped his fist in victory. If Sam was willing to handle parsing bookworm without his help, this day was just getting better and better.

"Will do, Sam."

"And Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"I mean it, about the STD's. Try to keep it together."

"Bite me, Sammy."

Sam hung up on him, so he tucked his phone away. "Hey, Luce," he called, and she looked up from cutting limes. "What'd that guy say about the hooker again?"

She rinsed her knife under a tap he couldn't see and dried her hands, picking up a small, very old looking purse. She had set a "Be back in a spell" sign on the bar-top while he was on the phone, and was heading for the door. "Not much."

He rose to follow her. "Humor me," he said, echoing her.

"All right, but I need to take my break. So it'll have to wait or you'll have to put up with the smoke," she said, already slipping one of the slender brown cigarillos from an honest-to-god silver cigarette case. 

He tried to have the good grace not to look aroused (he'd always hated the taste of cigarettes on a girl's tongue, but getting to watch a girl smoke almost made it worth it). "I'll put up with it," he said generously, and held the door from behind her until they'd cleared it. He had already produced his zippo when the cigarillo hit her lips.

"Polite," she observed, around it, eyebrows raised. "Got to wait a minute, though, need to clear the building by twenty feet."

"Twenty—? I hate this state," he muttered. "Are you even allowed to walk down the street with it lit?"

"I generally do," she conceded, "when the road's bare like this. Otherwise I walk up the hill to the cemetery, usually quieter."

Dean nodded, and when he judged they'd gotten twenty feet from the saloon, he lit his lighter smoothly and held it up to light her cigarillo. He watched her drag on it to get it going and tried to remember to ask her about the cemetery later, but the view (with her lips pursed and her cheeks hollowing and her breasts rising) was distracting and he lost hold of the thought. "Any chance you could point me to the Fallon, then?"

When she'd filled up as high as her corset would allow, she let it out slow from the side of her mouth, directed away from Dean. He still caught a smell that was darker than he was used to, something old like vanilla or tea leaves, not the papery, ashy burn of cheap cigarettes. "It would be my honor," she said. "Thank you, by the way," she added, indicating the cigarillo by waving it lightly.

"My pleasure," Dean said, and tried to not sound as sincere as he felt. "So what about this theory about the hooker?"

Lucille tilted her head, not looking at him. "Cullen said he'd heard there was a 'fallen frail' whose father did her in. She'd run away from home, and when he found her living in the hotel as an independent business woman, he killed her on the spot."

Dean frowned, uneasiness burrowing its way down his spine. "Hell of a thing to do to your own kid. Any details?"

"I have no idea how much was Cullen embroidering," she warned. "He's a storyteller so you never can tell. But he said she was strangled;" she said, ticking it off on a finger, "said she had a flower in her hair that fell to the ground when she died;" (another) "said the father was in a fugue, and once he realized what he'd done, went back home to Sacramento and hanged himself from the rafters of her old bedroom."

Dean flattened out his mouth. "Thought you said he didn't say much about it."

"I had no reason to believe he had any idea what he was talking about and wasn't just telling ghost stories," she said, and Dean thought she sounded a little defensive, and a little guilty. "Drunk men talk plenty, they just don't always talk sense."

"That's the truth," Dean admitted. "So you've never heard anything about this spirit before?"

She shook her head, then opened her mouth, closed it again, frowned. "Story sounds half familiar, now you mention. Read up on some of the more colorful local history when I moved up here. But I don't remember anything about her actually haunting the place."

The hotel was looming up in front of them, now, but he slowed down, lingering. "This stuff bothers you," he observed.

Lucille didn't respond, just drew long on her cigarillo. 

"After you get off work," Dean offered, as gentlemanly as he could, "what do you say I help you take your mind off it?"

After contemplatively tapping ash, she gave a slow nod. "We close at six." He thought her posture was loosening, her voice warming again. "Food's pretty good, if you're looking to eat first," she suggested. "Once the doors close, I can usually be out of there in ten."

Even if they found the ghost today, it'd be midnight before they could safely salt and burn. He could make that work.

"It's a date," he said, turning on one of those smiles made of heat and promise.

He was pretty sure the smile she gave back came in the same vein.

***

The woman at the hotel was a total 180.

She was in period costume, but that was where the similarities ended. Dean wasn't sure how it was possible for a woman in a lace-fringed bonnet to look so severe, but she managed. She wanted to examine his badge; she wanted to know what exactly he was investigating and what his standing was; she even asked if there was a warrant, and when he menaced his way through most of her objections, she insisted on following him through the halls. She warned him he'd be out on the street (such as it was) if he so much as breathed on a guest. (As far as Dean could tell, these were a precious commodity; the halls sounded almost empty.)

There was a joke to be made about not believing in the existence of guests, but at her withering look, it died on his lips.

Dean dawdled as long as he could, willing the bell at the check-in desk to ding, since he'd never be able to check for EMF with her hanging over him. When it didn't ring and didn't ring and still didn't ring, and he'd sniffed and felt for cold spots as much as he profitably could, he gave in and tried another tack.

"Ma'am," he said, and he tried out his best impression of Sam's gentle, puppy-dog look, "this is a beautiful hotel. What can you tell me about the history?"

Two hours of mollification and a surprisingly pleasant pot of sarsaparilla tea later, the hostess had told him everything he hadn't wanted to hear about the age and how it was built and who had owned it—she knew every owner and major transaction for a hundred and fifty years. But when he eventually managed to prod her in the right direction, she began to share every potentially paranormal event any guest had ever reported to her, and her memory was long and precise. There were all the Ghost Greatest Hits - flickering lights, chills, room keys moving from one place to another, whispers in the night, the feeling someone invisible was in the room. There was a boy with a ball who played in upstairs hall and sometimes climbed onto the bed in room 2. The lights liked to turn themselves off and the tap in the sink on in Room 5. Someone regularly turned down the beds off the downstairs hall, and it wasn't the maid. Phantom sets rolled in the attached theater, in the night. Enough guests had reported these enough times, and reported them consistently enough, that Dean gave them some grudging credence, guessing at at least three or four regular dead participants. But nothing sounded like the painted lady or her violent death.

"Any newer additions?" he tried, about ready to give up. "Anything about a…" (what had Lucille called it?) "…a 'fallen frail'?"

The hostess gave him one of those looks of grudging admiration he sometimes got, the "maybe it's not as dumb as it looks." He clenched his jaw and suppressed a look.

"Well," she said, primly, "we have had a _few_ gentlemen who stayed in Room 9 mentioning a young lady whispering to them in the night while they were sleeping."

Dean nodded slowly, anticipation rising in his stomach. "And could they say what she was whispering?"

"Things best not to repeat in polite company," she said, with an air of finality. Dean supposed that that fit in with a painted lady. Or a certain saloon girl.

Not seeing a way around it, he asked if there was any chance Room 9 was open to rent for the night. The hostess was suddenly much friendlier, and Dean called Sam while she fished out the key for him. He resented having to pay good cash to do the town a service, but he didn't have a credit card that matched this Feeb ID and the hostess had already been a little disbelieving when his badge had read Freddie Mercury in the first place. He figured she'd notice a different fake name on the charge. 

"Guess what, Sammy?" he reported, and didn't wait for him to guess. "We're staying in style, tonight. Room 9 at the Fallon."

"You rented it?" Sam asked, sounding puzzled.

"Bitch wouldn't let me in otherwise," Dean muttered under his breath, once he'd paced further into the lobby. "She was on me like sulfur on a demon the whole time I was trying to get a read on the place."

"All right," Sam allowed. "Did you get anything on an identity for the ghost?"

Dean gave him the rundown on Lucille's intel and the naughty whisperer in Room 9. "Could be the same ghost, just finally gone off the reservation."

"All right, good work. I'll see if that jogs anything for the historian."

"Great. And Sammy," he added.

"Yeah?"

"Let's grab dinner at the saloon, say 5-ish."

"Is this because of the redhead?" Sam sighed. "We're working, Dean."

"I'm working," Dean insisted. "But there's going to be a dead period between when the sidewalks roll up for the night on all the tourist crap and when our ghost actually gets going in the room. And," he pointed out, "we don't even know who the hell she is, if she's actually going to be violent, and where her bones will be if she is. I don't think stopping for dinner is going to be a problem, man."

"If it's just stopping for dinner," Sam agreed. "But I get the feeling you've got a longer night planned than that."

"Yeah, well, uh. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Dean grinned to himself; he loved saying that in haunted hotels. 

The line clicked dead promptly. 

"Sam?"

Dean grumbled and slipped his phone away.

Over the next hour, he hiked back to where they'd parked and moved the Impala to the lot nearest the hotel. He took their duffles up to the room, then went back to assemble a basic spirit go bag, grabbed the demon knife and a machete just for kicks, and returned to set up the room.

The room had a single queen bed, and not much room for anything else—including, the hostess made very clear, any rollaway beds. She offered to switch him to a double double-bed room, when he protested, but he grumbled that that wouldn't be a lot of help and waved her off. If they actually slept there, one of them would manage with a bedroll; they'd slept on worse. And anyway, with any luck he'd have someone else's bed available to him, by the time it came down to actually sleeping.

He showered in the common shower room, shaved closer than usual, and changed into something he planned carefully to straddle the line between "hot, casual date" look and "comfortable enough to dig up a grave" (it was one of his greatest hits). It was just getting on to five when he had finished strapping on enough hardware to feel prepared and grabbed up his jacket, even if it was too warm for it now, heading out with a swagger already in his step.

When he got back to the saloon, Sam was already there—at a table as far from the bar as was physically possible, because he was a killjoy. He'd even arranged the chairs so neither of them would be facing the bar directly. Dean rolled his eyes, but he had great peripheral vision; he'd get through it.

The place finally had a few customers—a couple at a table, three men drinking around a pool table, a single woman at the bar—and a waitress was now working tables who would have been Dean's usual flavor if he hadn't already made plans. He still gave her the silent, "How you doin'?" with his eyebrows when she came with drinks. 

"Her, too?" Sam said, disapprovingly when she'd gone. "There are only so many hours in the day, Dean."

"I'm well aware, Sam. I know how to triage." 

Dean slugged from the beer Sam had ordered him; probably a craft beer with a stupid name referencing miners or gold country, he thought, but jam full of hops and with a dark, sweet edge, something that reminded him vaguely of bourbon. It grew on him, even if it wasn't his usual mass-market, domestic lager, so he eventually asked what it was, since he was halfway through it and thinking of another.

Sam shook his head. "No idea. I think your _'saloon girl,'_ " this came out a little stiffly, "sent it over for you. Seems like you made quite the impression." He was studiously poring over the menu, rather than making eye contact.

Dean gave an appraising smirk, and raised it towards the bar in thanks. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he was pretty sure Lucille winked at him.

"No need to be jealous, Sam," Dean said, but it came out full of gloating. "I can't help it if I'm a sex magnet."

"Magnet for venereal disease," Sam muttered.

"All right, what is with you and the VD today, man?" Sam's tension and needling was starting to grate on his nerves. "I didn't want to be here; I'm making the best of it."

"She's not even your type," Sam objected, and Dean threw up his hands. "Seriously, you _always_ go for tall, skinny girls, with really big breasts, and—"

"You know what, Sam," Dean interrupted testily, "nobody else gets to tell me what my 'type' is today. If it's hot, I'll screw it, end of story."

His voice had risen further than he'd meant to allow, and he sank a little in his chair to duck the looks now being angled on him by a couple of other patrons. 

" _Hot_ equal _good,_ Sam," Dean emphasized, but very quietly, this time.

The afternoon's conversation came too firmly to mind, then, with the specter of sharing a girl with his brother just because she thought it was hot, and she was hot, and he got a little warm under the collar. He ran a finger around the neckband of his t-shirt, airing out. 

"Forget I said anything," Sam mumbled. 

An uncomfortable silence rolled out between them, then. Eventually the waitress broke it by coming back to take their orders (Dean's was full of rare, red meat), and Sam haltingly began to catch him up on what he'd learned from the historian. He'd gotten a list of likely names—everyone who had died inside the hotel over its long history, narrowed to the ones that could be women (some had only first initials and last names), with a handful highlighted based on any available detail Sam thought might match the story they were given. He wanted to focus on the ones who were for sure women, who were young, and who had checked in alone and been lodging at the hotel for a week or more.

"Maybe we can find some record of the old man," Dean suggested, begrudgingly letting himself be drawn into the case talk, "see if we can find a last name that matches one of these. Think she said Sacramento was where he went back to hang himself, might have made the news there at the time."

Sam nodded and slipped out his laptop right away. "On it."

Dean was going to chide him for not relaxing, for working through dinner, but their food wasn't there, yet, and anyway, it gave him the chance to unwind some of the tension that had built up by leaning back leisurely to make eyes at Lucille. When his beer was drained, she filled another pint without asking and strolled it over to the table herself.

"Thank you, Lucy," Dean said, grinning wider than he meant to. "This is, uh, really good. What is it?"

"Scotch Ale, Dust Bowl." Her hand brushed over his shoulder, with no excuse. "Age it in whisky barrels, does something dark and fine to it."

Dean turned a satisfied smile on his brother, just to irritate him, but Sam was staring at Lucille, instead, mouth a little agape. But she seemed only to have eyes for Dean. She touched Dean's shoulder one more time, and went back to the bar.

Sam's face was frozen, doing that thing he did where his whole scalp and forehead and ears had pulled away from his eyes, rather than just his eyebrows. He went back to his laptop, but he wasn't typing, and his eyes weren't moving enough for him to be reading.

"What is it, Sam?" Dean finally asked, tiredly, trying to keep the frustration out of his tone. "You gonna share with the rest of the class?

"Maybe…" Sam swallowed visibly, shook his head. "Maybe don't go home with her."

Dean frowned. "The hell not? She is all over me, man. And the corset, Sammy—a corset is a beautiful thing." He grasped Sam's arm bracingly, giving him a little shake for emphasis.

Sam's eyes shifted rapidly, then, without looking up at Dean. "Think I saw cat hair on her," he said, and Dean was pretty sure Sam was making that up. "If you go back to her place you won't have any fun, you'll be too busy having an allergy attack."

"So I'll take her back to the Fallon," Dean replied, losing patience, "and drop her back home before 'the witching hour.' Not like she doesn't realize what's going on here, anyway."

"You don't think that's a little weird?" Sam asked, finally making eye contact. There was something strange and tense boiling under the surface, but Dean couldn't figure out what it was and at the moment was too irritated to care.

"No, Sam, I don't," he said on a sigh, "she's been through something like this, before, so she's obviously more aware than your average civilian. She was at the fair, Sunday, too," he added absently, "kind of, uh, looked like someone you'd have banged when you didn't have a soul, actually. Like that hippie chick, the one at the alien thing who smelled funny?" He smiled at the memory, now; the distance of time had finally allowed the fairy incident to be a little funny, horrifying though it had all been at the time.

"How is that…" Sam began, but then sat up straighter, rigid as a hunting dog. "Wait, what? What are the chances of her being at both of these cases?"

Dean shrugged. "I don't know. She was in on some thing in Stockton, couple years ago, too. Maybe she's like us, just a magnet for weird shit, always in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Or maybe she's involved somehow," Sam argued, in his most maddening "I'm being so sensible" tone, though Dean suspected it was covering a note of inexplicable panic. "It's not like we're sitting back and avoiding trouble when it finds us. Dude, for all you know she could be a witch building curses or summoning spirits."

Dean waved this off as madness, and tried not to let it worm into the back of his brain. "So I'll be careful, check for hex bags or whatever."

Sam folded his arms tightly across his chest, and it bulged the shoulders of his suit a little menacingly. "Dean, what do you always say about coincidences?" 

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Dean admitted, reluctantly, running a hand over the back of his neck and trying to sigh a little of Sam's contagious tension out of his shoulders. "But for some of us, 'wasn't for bad luck, we wouldn't have no luck at all,'" he paraphrased, "and I can see that being in her wheelhouse, same as in ours. Pretty sure she's three miles of bad road," he added, with poorly hidden relish.

"Only you," Sam said with an exasperated laugh. "Dean, only you would think that was a _good_ thing."

"Lucky for you I do, or I'da' kicked you to the curb a long time ago." He meant it fondly, and Sam's smile let him know he took it in that spirit. "Smarter people wouldn't put up with the train wreck that is us and our track record."

"Fair enough," Sam said, and shook his head. "Just… be careful, okay? Think with the head on your shoulders, too, not just the one in your pants."

Dean snorted. "Now what fun would that be?" 

Their food came and they ate in relative peace, Sam sifting through historical websites and offering a running commentary. Dean was watching him, just enjoying the food and the company (annoying though his brother might be, sometimes) and the thoughts of what lay ahead for him in the night. He felt more at ease than he had in weeks, more optimistic. He felt the way the Impala sounded when she was tuned up to perfection, that purr of anticipation unfolding when he keyed the ignition.

The nagging feeling of being watched eventually took him out of himself, and Dean scanned around until he saw the waitress. Sam's research-in-public seemed to have caught her notice, and the way she was watching Sam at the machine was a little judgy for Dean's taste (maybe they took their "historical town" designation seriously). Unthinking, he put up his hackles to warn her off. He'd practiced his "back off my baby brother" vibe for some thirty years and had honed it to a knife's edge, not to mention whatever layers of threatening composure he'd built up through hunting, bluffing witnesses, and that time in hell they studiously never mentioned. She looked slightly offended, when she caught his look, but more scared, so he settled, satisfied he'd done his job. She brought the check before they'd even finished eating, abrupt and with none of the usual offers of dessert or drinks, and she disappeared while he laid out enough cash for tab and a reasonably good tip, judgy or not.

Dean's beers—and his whiskeys earlier in the afternoon—were not listed on the receipt; Lucille was either covering them herself or omitting them from his tab, then. He was pretty sure he hadn't had a woman buy him drinks since he was too young to buy his own, and he briefly considered taking it as a slight to his manhood, but opted for feeling spoiled and fawned over, instead. It had to be the bartender equivalent to making you eggs and waffles in the morning, and he hadn't even earned it yet. He badly suppressed a smile. 

After he scraped the last of his plate clean and wiped his mouth (nothing more embarrassing than trying to look smooth and realizing you had mashed potatoes smeared on your face), he sent his best "I will repay you in ways you can't even imagine" grin over to the bar, and Lucille pulled one of the pins from her hair like a librarian in a Bogart movie, like a promise. A curl uncoiled from the pin and bounced down over her shoulder.

Dean managed, barely, not to groan.

"All right, so I think the cemetery's up the hill," he said, pushing his chair back from the table with an angry scrape. "Maybe you can scout out our draft picks up there, and I'll call you if anything hinky happens up in the hotel room. Otherwise I'll see you in a few hours at the Fallon?"

"Dean, what—?" Sam began, then turned one of those "don't you dare" looks on him he'd been working since he was six years old. "Am I supposed to just sit in the cemetery, in the dark, with the bones of a potentially vengeful spirit, while you go off and…?" 

"…and have a good time," Dean agreed. "Yes. Smart boy."

Sam glared daggers.

"Sorry, Sammy, looks like everything else is going to close up right about now. If you get scared in the boneyard, maybe you can scout out the rest of the hotel," Dean offered, conciliatory. "They claim to have plenty of ghost activity." 

Sam was not consoled. "Jerk," he muttered, shaking his head.

"Bitch," Dean replied automatically, grinning in satisfaction.

He picked up his jacket and slung it artfully over his shoulder, confident he was projecting James Dean as he did. With a promising wag of eyebrows at Lucille, he slipped out the door to wait.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, PSA: choking is actually more dangerous than it sounds. Like randomly stop your heart dangerous. So I feel obligated to suggest you not try it at home.

The sun was dropping and the air was starting to chill, so Dean slid on his jacket and leaned up against the wall (one foot up and arms crossed, to keep the 50's pinup vibe going). He gave Sam a loose salute when he left, and ignored the other patrons, carefully schooling any eagerness out of his face, his posture. He was cool; it never paid to let the girl know you were about to burst out at the seams.

Lucille, it seemed, had no such compunction. She tumbled out of the door in flurry of satin and swishing petticoats, flushed from rushing her closing, or from something else. A few pins came out of her hair at once when she yanked, shoved into the little bag over her wrist, and there was another weightless uncoiling. Dean wanted badly to slide his fingers into the curls and mess them up, wanted to pull. 

He stood up slow from the building, sliding his hands into his jean pockets, all predatory ease. After a moment's hesitation, Lucille closed the distance and slid her hand daintily around one of his elbows. 

"Where to, Miss Lucille?" he rumbled down close to her ear.

Dean was grateful she was in heels; at least she up came past his chin, this way, and he could see her big eyes tip up at him, glittering bright. 

"Bar's still open at home," she offered, voice low with intent, and Dean nodded, ready to let her lead until Sam's strange warning came back to mind.

"Sounds great, but, uh…" Dean scuffed his heel over the dirt below, hardly believing he was crediting it. "Do you… do you have cats?"

"Three," she said, nodding. "Why, you allergic?"

Why did that raise the hairs on the back of his neck?

"Yeah," he said, voice a little thin, and she looked sympathetic. He cleared his throat and shook it off.

"No big deal. I think I've got something for a nightcap up in my room, if you don't mind cheap bourbon," he suggested. "Or, uh, letting a strange man take you back to his hotel." His grin here was wide and wicked; he might have overdone it, trying to quash the thread of uneasy with sheer macho determination. Lucille didn't seem to mind. 

"Never had the strongest sense of self-preservation," she admitted, a little breathily, and let him lead her away, heels crunching in the gravel.

"Self-preservation's overrated," he opined, squeezing her arm against his. "What's a little stranger danger between friends?"

An aphrodisiac, if the flush across her bosom was any indication. His jeans became uncomfortably tight as he stiffened in them, and he adjusted his hands awkwardly in his pockets to conceal it. He only realized he was walking faster when Lucille began skipping steps to keep up. With a deep, cooling breath, he slowed down enough that she could walk briskly instead of trotting, and she gave him a look of gratitude, tinged with embarrassment.

It evaporated when she saw the Fallon, though.

"Isn't it…" she began, failed. "Aren't you," she tried again, "investigating something in there?"

"Yeah, but spirits don't tend to get going until close to midnight unless something sets them off," he soothed, "we've got four, five hours before we have to worry about anything like that." He tried to inflect that heavily with promise. He could make a lot happen in four hours.

She was hanging a little tighter on his arm, dragging their pace down to almost nothing, but in the end she nodded slowly, let him lead her in. He held the door for her, because whatever Sam thought, he wasn't a caveman, but he surprised himself when he took her hand to lead her up the stairs, looking back at her like he could steady her if his eyes only held enough promise. She followed like she was hypnotized, but her pulse was racing through her palm, her grip tight.

The bonneted woman at the desk was giving them a look that could melt a face. Dean ignored that soundly.

When he stopped outside room 9 to unlock the door, Lucille looked tense, but didn't say anything. As soon they were inside, though, she demanded, "Bourbon," voice rough and deep.

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and had poured them each a generous tumbler in moments. He was in no way above getting someone moderately drunk to seal the deal.

Her tumbler was halfway emptied by the time he had even got the lid back on the bottle, and he'd only gotten one generous pull from his own glass when she dropped her purse on a chair and backed him up into the bed, all sudden aggression and intent. Dean grunted appreciatively. She took both drinks and set them on the nearest flat surface, crowding him until he sat, and hoisted one knee onto the bed beside his hip, draping her arms around his neck. Her eyes were dark (human dark, pupils wide), her lips parted, and her breasts would be brushing his chin if they rose any higher with her short breaths.

Dean gave into that wish to slide one hand into her hair, the other down to her cinched little waist, and after a hovering moment of anticipation, dove into her waiting mouth.

The bourbon had covered enough of the tobacco taste to make it manageable. And the sound she made… God, it was a groan of so much hunger and relief, and she was all tongue and scraping, nipping teeth, her fingers in his hair. He let his fingers tighten just a little in her curls and she moaned against him, and something came unleashed inside of him, something that wanted to run and to bite. He slid the hand at her waist down under her to scoop her the rest of the way into his lap, and let the momentum carry them both back until he hit the mattress, rolling her onto her back beneath them. She broke the kiss for a hot, panting breath, and he thought he might just eat her alive.

Dean descended on her, plunging his tongue into her tiny mouth, twisting it with hers. Her hands slid inside his jacket, rucking up his shirt, and he ran his fingers down her hips, thighs, searching for a way under the petticoat. He felt short fingernails scraping where her fingers were curling against his skin, and she broke the kiss again to tip her head back, baring her throat. Dean obliged by kissing it, open mouth and flat tongue, and she dug in her fingers, goading, until he bit down.

The short, sharp, "Yes!" she whispered burrowed in his groin, and he didn't need any further encouragement, nipping his way over every inch of her neck that wasn't blocked by the sharp black line of the choker. She thanked him with trembling fingers in his hair, down the back of his neck, pushing under the edge of the jacket until he broke away just long enough to shuck it off. When he dove back in, this time he got both hands firmly under the petticoat, roving up over the fishnet until he felt—Christ—the straps of a garter belt, and the soft skin of bare hips above. Her legs came up to lock around his back, tightening until his hips were flush with hers, the hard line of his erection grinding against her.

She cursed, a little string of whispered obscenity, kissing wildly over his face, anywhere she could reach. When he ducked to nip her collarbone, the tops of her breasts, she cradled his head like he was a precious thing, kissing his hair and murmuring heated nothings, _Yes_ and _Oh_ and _Please._ She sounded like she was coming undone.

Unable to help himself, Dean buried his face in the soft swell of her bosom, cool and heaving. He was glad he'd shaved close; the slick of his cheek against the skin there felt like silk, like nothing could be smoother. He licked errant lines over her breasts, here and there sucking little marks and nipping hard enough to leave impressions in her skin, and she keened every time something was just enough to hurt. In a bizarre flash he imagined her tied to a chair for some "enhanced interrogation," with her getting hotter and hotter the more evil he got and the more he took her apart, and it made his groin ache even as it brought a cold sweat to the back of his neck. He broke off for a moment, trying to pull himself together and put any inkling of hell out of mind, and sat back on his knees to pull his t-shirt off, to try to cover it. Automatically, he rolled his shoulders through the motion to flex muscle at her (it was the kind of move that happened without even thinking, anymore), gazing down at her until he could fix the feeling of hunger into his bones, the look of want to his face.

If Lucille had noticed the flash of terror in his eyes, she showed no sign. She looked purely debauched, and he didn't have to try to keep his focus, anymore. Her lipstick was gone (he figured he was wearing it), her eyes heavily lidded, and the feathers and remaining pins and combs were coming loose in her increasingly wild hair. In a sudden lurch, she was twisting to roll as much onto her belly as his station between her thighs would allow, gesturing vaguely at the laces of her corset.

He backed off the bed so she could roll the rest of the way, and let his hands rove up over the hard bones under the black brocade, settling with some small wonder over her slim little waist, thumbs meeting in the middle as his fingers gripped deep over her ribs. So tiny, he thought vaguely, he could crush her in his hands…

"Laces," she panted eventually, "loosen them a little—need—get the top off—"

It didn't quite parse, but he obeyed, finding the tight, efficient bows at the center of the corset and yanking them open, tugging at the crossed lines up and down until the edges began to sigh open and he could see the green satin of her dress beneath.

As soon as there was breathing room, she performed some quick, complicated looking maneuver and the top (not a dress, then, but two pieces) came free from under the corset, thrown with enough force that it made a light thwack on the headboard. "Buttons," she commanded, and he looked a little wildly until he spotted the little buttons at the waist of her skirt, now visible under the edge of the corset. 

Dean yanked her roughly by the hips to the edge of the bed (she made a delighted little sound, something between a yelp and a laugh) and undid the buttons, waiting for her to get her feet under her before pulling the skirt and petticoat down over her hips. He crouched behind her to nose over one thigh where it met the swell of that amazing ass, roved his hands over her fishnets and under the straps of the garter belt. 

When he rose again, she'd already yanked off her little fingerless lace gloves and pulled the rest of the decorations from her hair, knocking them carelessly off the edge of the bed. He started to roll her over, but she begged, "Wait," on a breath, and then, "tie me back up." He imagined her tied to a chair again, but she was waving at the ever loosening laces of the corset and understanding slotted into place.

"How tight?" he asked, voice a growl, barely human, as he gathered the ends of the laces in his hands and started to pull.

"If the grommets meet, I'll probably pass out." (Why did that not sound like a warning?) "Short of that…" she breathed, "tight as you want."

He wasn't sure why that was so hot, though it might have been the way she gasped and moaned as he started to pull; it was clearly doing something for her, and often enough, that was all Dean needed to get on board. But the tighter he pulled, the smaller she got in the middle, and the more extreme her hips looked by comparison, the more essentially lush and female. There was something about it that made him feel powerful, masculine and rough and in control, and he could see her fingers clutching the bedspread, could smell the wetness of her.

When there was about an inch left in the gap, he paused, panting even though the effort wasn't great. "More?" he asked, and his voice sounded rough, sounded mid-fight.

She moaned her response, and it shot straight to his dick. He braced one boot on the bed frame for leverage, wrapped the laces one more time over his fists, and hauled back, bringing the edges of the corset a hair's breadth apart. The sound that came out of her then was high and breathless, a gasp of aching and thrill.

Barely able to focus, he tied off the laces as fast as he could in a sailor's knot.

Lucille's legs were failing her, and her hands were shaking as she reached back, fumbling for the lacy edges of the black panties she'd been wearing over the garter straps. Dean took the initiative and grabbed them, pulling them off as assertively as he could without tearing them outright, and she practically cooed. They were heavy from how wet she'd gotten, and the curls of red fur beneath were gleaming with it.

His jeans felt so tight they were hard to unzip.

Dean stripped his belt off, tossing it across the bed, and pulled his wallet out, throwing it on the dresser once he'd snagged a condom from it. The new shred of space that opened up for him was just barely enough to get the jeans open and down his hips. He didn't have the patience for his boots, so this would have to do. 

Lucille got her feet under her enough to arch her hips higher into the air in lurid invitation, and used a hand to pull her hair up off her her neck and aside so she could see him. Or so her neck was bared at him, he wasn't sure which. Her mouth was agape, panting, soft.

He got the condom on as fast as he could, then fell on her, kissing the side of her mouth awkwardly over her shoulder, then nipping her jaw and neck (hard, now, careless). One hand he laid over one of her wrists, gripping (he thought he had a pretty clear picture of her "tendencies," now, and her low groan and fluttering eyes told him he was right). The other hand, he slid between her thighs, into the folds, gathering slickness—God, she was so, so wet—to rub over the condom before lining up.

" _Yes, yes, yes,_ " she was whispering, over and over, pulling half-heartedly at the wrist he had vised down, and when he thrust home, they both let out strangled sighs.

Dean held very, very still for a moment, sucking in shuddering breaths to cool down, to calm down and not lose it completely. To cover it, and because he was a gentleman who liked to make a woman as happy as possible, he brought up the hand that was still wet with her to gather her free wrist, pinning it down beside her face.

And then she craned her neck over and _licked his fingers,_ and Dean's brain overloaded. He was almost surprised there weren't sparks, the smell of melting and the hiss of smoke coming out of his ears. His hips rolled in spite of his best efforts, and he let go of her wrist to slip two fingers obligingly into her mouth.

She sucked greedily, rolling her tongue around and over and between to clean herself off of him, kept suckling until he took them back. She moaned protest, until he gripped her wrist again and shifted upright enough that he could drag both of her hands to the small of her back, crossing her wrists over the laces of the corset. 

" _Yes_ " turned to " _Please,_ " and she squeezed his dick so hard he gasped. 

He changed his grip to brace both of her wrists under one hand, freeing the other to run hungrily over her skin. For a moment, he held there, just staring down at her body, at the wild wanting written on her, at the way the black fabric was so dramatic against her pale skin, somehow obscene. He tried to talk himself back from the ledge, steel himself to last, but her writhing made it difficult. He finally pulled back enough to pump in hard, hard enough to rock her further up the bed, and she let out a cry, soft and needy. _Please_ turned back to _yes_ and then to cursing, a whispered litany of foul-mouthed lust.

When he’d caught his breath, Dean began to roll into her, slow and deep, circling his hips just a little to grind up against her. Her breathing was sharp and shallow, but the little soft huff of an exhale grew into a moan, anyway, from low in her belly. He repeated the maneuver, but slid the hand not currently serving as cuffs up her back and into her hair, tangling and tightening just enough (he hoped) to sting, but not really hurt. Her eyelids fluttered again, and she ground back against him, breath short enough that her moans rumbled into something that sounded like an honest-to-God purr in her throat. Every thrust after that pulled a sighing purr from her, and her muscles clutched at him randomly, unevenly, so hot and wet that he still slid freely as they did. 

"More," she begged, almost a sob.

"Anything," he promised stupidly, "anything you want."

There was half a moment's hesitation, the pained face and silent embarrassment of asking for the unusual, but when he pulled her hair a little tighter—a promise he'd be cool with whatever it was she wanted—she mumbled, "Belt," and arched her head back into his hand, lifting her throat from the bed.

Dean had to slow down again, to process. His belt was still half on the mattress. He could think of half a dozen things to do with it, so he finally asked, "Where? How?"

"Around," she pleaded, "Neck." Her mortification was evident, but so was her desperation and greed. 

His brain supplied that this was screwed up—too screwed up, almost sharing-her-with-Sam screwed up—but his body went on auto-pilot, letting go of her wrists to slide the belt under her neck, to thread the end loosely through the buckle. He didn't slip it into a tight noose (too easy to mess up, he thought, surprisingly clearly), but instead wrapped his fist around the loop he'd made, knuckles against the back of her neck, so the flat of the leather pulled taut against her throat. It would dig and cut off her air if he pulled, or if she rocked away when he thrust, but it couldn't tighten up and accidentally strangle her if he lost his head.

He mentally patted himself on the back, and she squeezed his dick like a vise, cheeks flushed bright pink and breath shorter still than before. She still managed to whisper, "Yes, yes, please, _yes_ …" but when he moved in her again, his weight leveraged against the belt and cut her off, and her face slipped into a mask of silent bliss.

Her hands were still at the small of her back, so he laid a hand over them again, but more for balance than anything. He didn't think he could get a hand under her to help her along—not and still hang onto the improvised collar—but he'd deal with that when it came to it. For now, he let himself push into her in earnest, and as he built a rhythm, she began to rock with him, still managing little keening gasps when she got the air for it, now and then cursing vividly.

It felt amazing, but he thought of her breasts heaving in the corset, and suddenly wanted so badly to see them that he forced himself to disengage. (The sound she made when he did made him feel like a criminal, but also like a sex god, so he called it even.) He let go of the belt to pull her hands out from behind her, dragging them out and up over her head. They stayed where he put them, so he had both hands free to haul her up at the hips, flipping her onto her back on the bed, throwing her heels up over his shoulders. 

He couldn't use the belt the same way, here—he'd have to tighten the noose if it were going to do its job properly and he wasn't ready to risk that. Inspiration struck, though, and he slid the belt from her neck to gather it tight around her wrists instead, and she opened her eyes, watching him breathlessly (even without the pressure on her neck). Locking eyes with her, then, he laid one hand over her throat (it looked so small and pale under his hand!), and slid back inside of her until he was buried to the hilt. 

Her eyes rolled up into her head and the whispered chants of "Yes" and "more" and "please" returned. He could see her chest rising and falling rapidly, shallowly, the edges of her nipples starting to come free above the straight top edge of the corset as he began to rock into her again. He strained down against her legs, pinned between them, to get close enough to nip at her breasts again, and when he bent his knees to brace against the bed for balance, he must have found the magic angle, because she wailed as much as his hand on her throat would allow. He tightened it slightly, just enough to cut her off into a whisper, and from there every breath was labored, every gasp turning her skin pinker and hotter. The sounds where they were colliding were obscene, now, loud with wetness and the slap of skin on skin, and she was leveraging against him with strong legs to angle her hips, madly and without pattern or order. She looked like something caught in a spider's web, all writhing and bucking and heaving.

The thrill of driving a woman out of her mind, of her becoming almost not human anymore under his hands, sent Dean over some kind of internal precipice and he began to move wildly, fierce and half mad. He grappled his free arm round her leg, his last shred of conscientiousness angling to press the pad of his thumb over her clit; it was inelegant but the force of their rocking was enough to make it work. Lucille got enough of a breath through his grip on her throat to start to howl as she shuddered in orgasm, and he tightened down on her throat again to silence her, driving through the pulsing and trembling and kicking for another half a minute before he came hard enough that his vision got dark around the edges. 

Dean felt a weak pawing at his hands and blinked his eyes clear, cursing when he realized Lucille was trying to get him to let go. 

He did, abruptly, apologizing in a half panic and brushing his fingertips shakily and soothingly over her throat. When she let out a shallow scream, he tried to shush her and to form coherent platitudes ( _no cops, no cops, no cops_ he thought, wildly), but she wasn't looking at him this time, was looking past him to the door. Dean turned and slipped free of her just in time to see an angry-looking column of grey smoke solidifying into an even angrier woman, neck dark with bruises and eyes shot dark with blood where the capillaries had burst as she strangled to death. There was a lily in her hair.

"I'm an idiot," he had time to say before the ghost knocked him back several feet into the wall behind him.

 _Idiot, idiot, idiot,_ he repeated in his mind as he tried to shake off the daze of the collision. "Iron," he said out loud, instead, waving Lucille toward the fire poker he'd tucked as unobtrusively beside the bed as he could. He was only a few feet from the bag with the gun loaded with salt rounds, but the ghost was descending on him, icy, ethereal hands wrapping around his throat, ready to wreak on him what had been wrought on her.

His vision and hearing began to black out. He vaguely heard scraping and banging, and then the explosion of a shot being fired as he passed out.

***

When Dean woke up, Sam was crouched over him, patting him on the cheeks. He was apparently talking to Lucille while she yanked on her skirt (refusing to let go of the iron poker long enough to do it), but the sound hadn't resolved into sense over the screaming throb in Dean's ears, yet. 

"Dean? You back with us?" Sam asked, and this time Dean could make it out. He nodded, albeit unsurely, and Sam slapped his shoulder. "Great. Then put your dick away, we gotta move fast or she'll be back."

Dean thought he should be more mortified, but figured that would come later, when he was back in his right mind. Maybe when the king-hell headache let up. The condom came off with very little dignity, and he gingerly tucked himself away while he waited for his eyes to finish focusing the multiple rooms into a single image. Lucille was gone from view, he noticed, her petticoat and who knew what else left behind. He'd have to worry about that later, too. 

Sore from his collision, Dean reached half-blind for his t-shirt while Sam grabbed the spirit-smiting bag and offered him a hand. Dean took it and was hauled up to his feet, reaching uncertainly toward the wall for balance. 

"Okay," he muttered, "okay, we got this." It was more to convince himself than Sam, but Sam agreed and slapped him on the back again to start driving him toward the door. They were just crossing and salting the threshold behind them when the ghost reappeared inside the room, and she rushed after their retreat until the salt brought her up short. She howled, and it sounded like the wind.

"Cemetery," Sam instructed, and Dean nodded, trying to get enough deep breaths to wake his brain up. They took the steep stairs fast and stumbling, and fetched their shovels and flashlights from the trunk.

They didn't speak while they hoofed it through the empty street and toward the hill the cemetery covered, just moved as fast as they could without tripping. As they opened the low gate to the cemetery, Dean hoped Sam actually knew whom they were digging up.

As if reading Dean's mind, Sam reported, "Abigail Warren is the prostitute who was strangled there. Found the father in an old Sacramento news clipping, and worked backwards, just like you suggested. Think it was her?"

"Yeah, Sammy, pretty sure it was her," Dean replied, tiredly. "What with the bruises on her neck and on now on mine."

"Any idea what set her off?" Sam asked, and it was guarded in a way that made Dean think he already had an idea. He sighed silently.

"Uh, yeah." He followed Sam, who seemed to know where he was going, further and further up the hill. The stones got taller and older, the higher they climbed. "So, uh, yeah. Lucille is a little bit, um… well…"

"Kinky," Sam said, stiffly, and even though Dean couldn't see it in the dark, he was sure Sam had on one of his judgmental bitch faces.

"Kinky," Dean agreed, tersely. "And I wasn't exactly thinking straight at that point, so it didn't occur to me that a little, uh, consensual choking would upset our dead hooker."

"It didn't occur to you," Sam said, acidly. "She dies of strangulation in that room," he continued, voice rising, "and you go strangling a girl dressed probably a lot like Abigail would have dressed back in the day, on her bed." Sam let out a sound of pure frustration. "Great. Brilliant work, Dean!"

Dean shushed him, though he didn't see any signs of humans nearby.

"I _told_ you," Sam repeated, "I _warned_ you—"

"Yes," Dean snapped, "you did. What do you want me to say?" He tripped on a small stone and kicked it angrily. "I'm sorry, Sam. I screwed up."

"Whatever," Sam said on a huff, and started shining the beam of the flashlight onto the headstones one at a time. "Maybe actually listen to me the next time, huh?"

"If you weren't always such a cockblock, maybe I would," Dean granted, trying weakly to lighten the mood. Sam didn't seem interested, and just thrust down his shovel when he found the right marker, old and near the very top of the hill. A stern cross was carved into the stone above her name.

They settled in to dig in silence.

***

When they eventually got back to the hotel (filthy, hot, and tired, but accomplished), everything they'd left in the room—and anything Lucille had—was waiting outside the front entrance in a heap. The door was locked, and the lobby was dark.

"Great," Dean muttered. "Perfect."

"At least it doesn't look like they called the police," Sam offered, tiredly.

Dean wasn't in a mood to be mollified. He wanted a shower; he wanted a bed. He loved his Baby, but she wasn't the most comfortable place to sleep when you'd just spent hours digging up a grave.

"I'm filthy and I smell like smoke," he replied. "And we don't even have Lucy's number to get these things," he ruffled the petticoat, "back to her, what are we—"

"She's over the hill," Sam interrupted, absently.

"What?" Dean said, squinting. "She's like my age."

"No, she _lives_ over the hill. Past the cemetery," Sam explained, hauling one of the bags onto his back. "We can drop it off before we head out of town tomorrow."

Dean stared at the pile, trying to make a not-destructive bundle with the pins and purse in the middle, so he wouldn't lose anything, then looked at Sam's back as he headed for the car. "Wait, how do you know where she lives?" He grabbed up his bag awkwardly over one arm, trying to see over crinoline.

There was a quiet moment, while Sam waited for him to catch up and unlock the trunk. "I uh… Yeah, I asked when you were unconscious," Sam said, with pretend ease, "told her to get home and get safe while we handled it."

"Did you?" Dean asked, flatly, watching him as they dumped their things in the trunk.

"Yeah," Sam said, not looking up at him, pulling out his cell. "Said we'd drop her stuff off when it was safe."

"How long was I out, Sammy?" Dean asked, skeptically.

"It's not like it was a long conversation, Dean," Sam said, a little hotly. "What's the problem?"

A few things slid into place in Dean's head.

"Oh, I don't know, Sam," Dean said, trying to find a way to keep the petticoat bundled so it wouldn't spill its contents. So far he hadn't figured out something that would work but also not crush it or get it filthy. "Just you been weird about her all day. Like somehow you knew she had cats, and somehow you knew she was kinky—"

"Okay, that part was pretty obvious from the getup in the room," Sam insisted.

"Maybe," Dean admitted, and looked up at him. "But there wasn't any cat hair on her, or I'd have been sneezing undressing her."

"So I was wrong," Sam said, shrugging, "big deal—"

"No, that's the thing, Sam," Dean said, finally giving up and tucking the crinoline back into a tight corner. He couldn't have a serious conversation holding it. "See, you were right about the cats, just wrong about the cat hair. So tell me, how does that happen?"

Sam spread his hands and shook his head vaguely, opening his mouth.

"And," Dean continued, before he could come up with an excuse, "you set us up as far from her as possible, you stared at her like she was a ghost when she was close up, and you been warning me up and down all day not to get into it with her." Dean gave Sam's shoulder a poke, crowding his space. "So what I gotta ask is _why,_ Sam? What the hell gives?"

Sam's mouth was a tight line, and Dean could see in the dim light over the parking lot that he was looking studiously down, scrabbling with something in his mind. 

After a long, tense moment, Sam finally said, "Stockton."

Dean blinked. "You know about what happened in Stockton?"

"Yes," Sam said, but didn't elaborate.

"How?" Dean prodded. When Sam hesitated, he added, "'Cause I know we ain't never been to Stockton, Sammy. Spill it."

There was a long sigh, thin and uneasy. " _I've_ been to Stockton," Sam said, shifting away from Dean's crowding to root around in his bag for something to use as a makeshift pillow. "And here, too."

"When?" Dean said, and then knew the answer before Sam spoke. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly slightly sick.

"When I was hunting with the Campbells," Sam said, and Dean nodded.

"When you didn't have a soul," he clarified.

"When I didn't have a soul," Sam agreed. His shame was palpable.

"So tell me what went down, Sammy—did she cross you? Did you cross her?" Dean rubbed his face. "She wasn't evil or you wouldn't have let me make it with her."

"I tried to stop you," Sam insisted, shucking his fed jacket and shirt into the trunk; they were as good as ruined from the night's dig.

"Yeah, but you'd have tried harder if you knew she was a witch or a demon or something. Which leads me to believe you just didn't want me to find out about whatever went down."

It was Sam's turn to close his eyes. He looked pained. "Dean, I… It wasn't good. _I_ was not good. Like 'worried she might press charges' not good." He pulled on a flannel shirt and balled up a couple others under his arm, and Dean begrudgingly opened the doors so Sam could start making a bed in the back seat. "But you were still right about her being three miles of bad road—she's trouble. And she keeps turning up at things like this, like a bad penny."

Dean dug up a few shirts of his own and smiled, in spite of himself. Copper hair, bad penny; it was fitting.

"Any reason to think she was involved in any of these events? Other than having the crappy luck to be there?"

Sam climbed into the back seat, sighing. "I never found any conclusive evidence. And she… never admitted to anything," he said, a little delicately.

The image of Lucille tied to the chair came back to mind, but this time Robo-Sam was the interrogator. Dean swallowed down some uncomfortable, unnamed feeling in his throat. He started to ask—something, but he wasn't sure what he wanted to know. He wasn't sure _if_ he wanted to know.

He figured he didn't—certainly not tonight—so he eventually just nodded and climbed into the front seat. He apologized quietly to Baby and promised he'd clean her seats tomorrow. 

He dozed off fitfully, and had strange dreams: Sam torturing Lucy; Lucy summoning demons; Lucy painting pentagrams on his stomach in blood. When dawn cracked his eyes open, he had to blink away the image of her spread out on a stone table between him and Sam as they began to eat her alive.


	3. Chapter 3

23 January, 2013  
7:05am, 45˚F  
Columbia, CA

Dean drove them groggily along badly paved roads while Sam provided reluctant navigation. He'd wanted to leave Lucy's things at the saloon and bolt, but Dean had bullied him into a debriefing, and anyway, he was pretty sure she'd want the purse she'd left behind before she went back to work, since it had a driver's license, keys, and cash in it. And what were the odds she'd have another petticoat just lying around?

Sam was giving him a look he couldn't parse and still watch the road, but it was intense, one way or another.

"Sam," Dean finally snapped, "spit it out."

"Dean, she chased me with an axe. _An axe._ Not because she was possessed, not because she'd been hexed, just because I pissed her off."

Thirty-some years of unflinching protectiveness went to war with prurient interest and very visceral recollections of just how Sam had behaved when he'd had no soul. When Dean couldn't think of how else to settle it, he asked, "Well?"

Sam scoffed loudly. "Well, what?"

"Well," Dean elaborated, waving one hand, "did you deserve it?"

When there was a straight enough stretch, Dean gave Sam a proper look, since Sam had gone curiously silent on the subject, and was now staring out the front window instead of at Dean. 

"Uh-huh," Dean said, wisely, looking back to the road. "I see."

"No, it's not like that, I just—I don't remember, exactly." Sam could apparently feel the disbelief radiating off of Dean, so he went on. "I mean, yes, I did some things that that would have been a reasonable response to, I just… don't think that's what set her off. She was… she was weird, man. I don't know what else to say."

Dean did a poor job of repressing his smile. "Yeah, I saw a little bit of that." Apart from getting choked out by a ghost, he felt yesterday had gone pretty well. 

"Honestly, Dean, I'm pretty sure you have _no_ idea," Sam insisted, and he sounded so serious Dean couldn't help laughing a little.

" _An axe,_ Dean," Sam repeated, unrelenting.

"Yeah, yeah, an axe, you said. I'm pretty sure most of the girls you've slept with have tried to kill you," Dean joked, but something went a little sideways in his head and he wasn't sure why.

"I didn't—I never said I'd—" Sam was stammering.

Dean snorted. "And that denial wasn't even a little suspicious," he teased. But the strange feeling was settling in, so he frowned and tried to run through the previous day in his mind to find the problem. "So, Sammy, you recognized her pretty quick, right?"

"Yeah," Sam mumbled, and there was a shade of guilt to it. "I wasn't positive until she brought you over that beer, but I was pretty sure."

"Huh," Dean replied, prodding at the thought to see what it would do. What was wrong with that?

"What?" Sam asked, now alert. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm not, I just…" That Sam made no joke there worried Dean a little, but he went on as if the joke had been made. "Shut up, I mean I'm not sure yet, something just…" Dean grimaced and shook a tense hand in the air behind his ear in the universal sign for "what's the name of that damn song I can't get out of my head," the frustrating sense of not-rightness you feel but can't place. "There's something that's just…"

"Yes," Sam agreed, "I felt that way the entire time."

"No, you didn't," Dean retorted, absently, "you thought _Samuel_ was okay, because you didn't feel jack for a year and a half." He shook his head. "Just… let me think for a second." 

"Turn here," Sam muttered, chastened, and Dean took a narrow gravel road canting up toward a truly evil-looking oak tree. He couldn't see anything beyond it, yet.

Dean slowed the Impala to buy time. "So, you recognized her. Right?" He felt like he'd caught hold of a wire, finally, and was tugging to see where it led. "Do you think she recognized you?"

Sam frowned in Dean's peripheral vision. "Of course."

"When?" Dean pressed.

"Well, definitely at the Fallon," Sam said, "but I can't imagine she didn't recognize me at the saloon at dinner. She was, like, a foot away."

Dean sorted the day again, then eased slightly. So she hadn't seen Sam up close when they were talking about—what they were talking about, then.

"What?" Sam prodded again, "Why?"

"She just… she said some things that would have been weird if she'd known who you were. If you left things so bad, I mean."

"That's pretty vague," Sam said drily. "Want to try for a detail?"

Dean pawed at the thing in his mind, praying for a way around it, then thanked the universe silently when he was struck with inspiration on how to lie about it without actually lying. "She, uh, she just said something about seeing my 'pretty partner with the John Lennon hair,' sounded like she was into you. Which would be weird if she knew who you were, right?" He glanced at Sam, but not long enough to read him. "But it was before dinner, so it was probably just from seeing us walking around the stupid craft fair thing."

Dean snuck another look at Sam, thought his face was getting a little red.

"So she didn't… mention me again after that?" Sam asked, with a casual tone that clearly wasn't, and Dean wouldn't have sworn to it, but he looked almost…

"…Sammy, are you jealous?"

Sam startled beside him. "What? No, absolutely not. I'm just—" Sam let out a frustrated sigh. "Look, this woman knew me at my worst, all right? You're the one who told me hunters should never go back to towns they've been in before, and when we're talking about me, during that year and a half? You're probably right. I can't even think about that part of my life without feeling this pit of regret and--and disgust."

Dean understood that all too well, even if he wasn't sure he believed Sam was giving him the whole truth. Considering he wasn't giving it to Sam, either, he guessed that made them even.

"Well, she didn't try to kill you at the Fallon. Maybe this is your chance to make amends," he offered, shrugging. "Give her those puppy dog eyes, tell her you're sorry, all that jazz."

"And what if she's sitting inside the door with an axe?" Sam asked, flatly.

"I'll go up first, then," Dean offered, generously, what with the cats. "Shit, reminds me, you got any allergy stuff in the trunk?"

"Might have a couple Benadryl, if you don't mind sleeping half the way back to Kansas."

"I can take it," Dean said, bravely, and shut the Impala off when the road ended under the oak.

***

"This tree is evil," Dean said, not joking even a little as he looked up into the dark, snarled branches, bare of anything but the occasional patch of green moss. "You remember that old, uh, Sleepy Hollow cartoon they used to play on TV every year at Halloween? This is like some Sleepy Hollow shit."

Sam laughed without feeling, beside him. 

"I'm serious, Sammy. A headless horseman is going to come galloping over the hill any second," he muttered, swallowing the Benadryl dry and trying to bundle up Lucy's things in his arms without looking like too much of a lace-covered tool.

"Dean, I think the thing most likely to throw a ball of fire at us right now is _her._ "

"Man," Dean scolded.

"Sorry," Sam sighed. 

Dean shrugged it off and steeled himself. "So how 'bout you wait here until I give you a wave, all right?"

Sam perched on the hood of the Impala, feet on the bumper, and nodded. "Yeah. Oh, hey, just, uh… be careful what you say about the animals, okay?" The tone was casual-but-not again, and Dean gave Sam a long look, but nodded.

"Sure, Sammy. Back in a minute."

"Right," Sam said, and almost sounded defeated.

Dean shook it off and walked under the spooky tree toward the front door.

"Pink?" he muttered to himself, taking in the weathered clapboard of the little bungalow—a faded pink with white trim, white door. The place was _cute._ "Did not expect that." A rooster was crowing, somewhere nearby; that was less of a surprise. 

Dean found the flaw in his plan when he realized he didn't have a hand to knock with and there was no bell. He was just beginning to rearrange, reaching for the latch of the screen door, when the wood door behind it creaked open onto three miles of beautiful bad road. He thought he should probably know better, but something warm and pleasant settled into his belly and he beamed at her, in spite of the lack of coffee. 

"Morning, Miss Lucille," he said, something like jauntily, and then felt like an idiot. She was rubbing her face blearily, one-handed. He cleared his throat and raised his full arms a little to indicate her things. "Just wanted to, um, bring you back the things you… you left behind," he said, and it fell flat on the way out. "…Sorry about… everything."

Lucille nodded slowly, unlatching and holding open the door for him. "Thanks, sugar. Come on in."

"Thanks. Listen, uh," he began, hesitating in the threshold, "I don't know what happened between you and my brother, before…"

Lucille was looking off at the wall. She made no move to interrupt, which was unfortunate, because Dean hadn't planned his way out of that statement, yet.

"He, uh. He used to be a different guy," Dean said, inadequately, "and I'm sure he was a total douchebag when you met him before, and he's sorry. And I'm sorry," he added, because he was, and he hadn't thought of anything better to say than that.

Lucille pushed the door a little wider open, then, looking past him to the Impala and its oversized hood ornament. After a long moment, she offered, "I'll put some breakfast on. You tea or coffee?"

"I would murder for a coffee, right now," Dean said, with feeling, then mentally kicked himself. "Metaphorically. Strictly. Can he, uh…?"

"Yeah, tell him—" She paused, then shook her head slightly. "Tell him he's welcome to breakfast, if he can behave himself."

"I promise you, he's very well behaved, these days. We've even had him housebroken," Dean joked lightly, and this one at least earned a little wry smile. He wasn't sure why he was so relieved. When Lucille withdrew and headed in, he turned and gave Sam a "get in here" jerk of his head, and though Sam didn't look even a little at ease, he climbed down from the car and crunched up the walkway.

Dean went in ahead, and followed her through an old-fashioned looking sitting room into a small kitchen. A tortoiseshell cat with a bent tail was lying on the counter, and booked out of sight when it saw Dean. He almost made a snide comment, something about not having wanted to say hi to it either, but Sam's warning still rang in his head, so he swallowed it. 

"So. You okay?" Dean asked, instead, setting down her things in roughly the same spot where the cat had been.

"Been better," she admitted, putting a full kettle on the gas stove behind her and reaching up to fish a glass French press out of a cabinet. The robe slipped down her arm, when she did, and Dean thought there were bruises blooming on her wrist, purpling over a little tattoo that looked like a woodcut of water. Guilt flushed his face red; he hoped there wouldn't be bruises on her neck, to match the ones on his. 

"Yeah, I bet," he said, and heard the screen door creak open behind him. He wanted to say something to her before Sam got near, something about how he understood if she wasn't still interested in getting with the both of them together, but he ran out of time before he could come up with a way to say it, and a moment of quiet wisdom told him that was probably for the best anyway.

"Sammy," he said, instead, "you remember Lucille. This woman is a saint; she's making us coffee."

"And eggs," she added, reaching into the freezer of a too-small, avocado-colored fridge from the '50's for a brown bag of coffee grounds. "'Less you want to wait a little longer and make it scones or pancakes."

"Whatever's easier for you," Sam said, slouching himself down, all martyr.

"Eggs sounds great," Dean said, his attempt at eager cheer sounding more like nerves, to his ear. "Thanks again, Luce, mighty fine of you."

Lucille gave him a smile over her shoulder that was soft enough to surprise him. "Don't get much excuse to show off," she said, with a shrug. "Omelettes or something else?"

"Omelettes sounds awesome," Dean said, sincerely, "got any pig to go with?"

Sam was already waving him down, but it was too late; it was out of his mouth and Lucille was giving him a slightly cooler look. "No meat in this house, other than the cat food. Got plenty of milk, butter, cheese, for protein. All sheep. Should have chard, dill, and parsley in the garden," she added, "mushrooms and dried bird's eye chilis in here, if any of that grabs you. Take your pick."

"Sorry," Dean said, slowly, darting his eyes between Sam and Lucille and holding very still in case something was about to give way under his feet. Or in case someone was going to get an axe.

"Dealer's choice," Sam said, diplomatically, and Dean thought he was working his sad puppy voice. "It's already too kind of you to be feeding us at all, considering the night you had."   
( _And,_ Dean heard unspoken, _considering everything else._ Whatever that might have been.)

Lucille was giving Sam the long look, this time. The kettle started to whine, though, so she let him off the hook and turned back to making the coffee.

"Y'all should bring your laundry in," she said, once the French press was full and brewing. "And wash up," she added, with a glance back at Dean, "look like you been rolling in the dirt."

"Pretty much have," Dean admitted. Sam was mumbling something about her not needing to put herself out over laundry, but without much conviction. She didn't bother to look up from cracking eggs into a bowl.

"Bath's in the back, through the bedroom," she said, pointing the general direction. 

"Lucy, you are a godsend," Dean said fervently, and called, "dibs on first bath," only partly because there was something uncomfortable brewing between his brother and his conquest that he wanted to get out from in under. "Sammy, get our stuff out of the car."

"I'm not going to make her do our laundry, Dean," Sam called, pained, after his retreat, as though Dean were causing him real grief.

He could just hear Lucille scold, "Just get the damn laundry, already," and smiled to himself as he found his way to sweet, sweet water.

***

Dean could hardly remember the last time he'd had a bath, instead of a shower. And sure, there was a small possibility one of the people in the kitchen would have tried to murder the other by the time he emerged, but he took his time and enjoyed himself anyway, singing to himself while he washed his hair and letting the very hot water soak into his muscles and joints, sore from digging. He watched a spider make its way across the ceiling, and another build a web between a big green waxy leaf (the place was filled with houseplants) and the shelf beside it. The water was an ugly color by the time he was finished, grit settling thickly at the bottom, and he thought maybe that was a reason he should stick to showers, but it was still the closest he would be getting to a hot tub for a while and he cherished it.

There was no product he could find—nothing—so he made do with a little of Lucille's conditioner thinned with water to get his hair groomed into something that looked almost effortless. Clothes was a harder thing to work out, but Lucille had seemed perfectly happy with his body the night before, so he wrapped the towel around his waist and padded down the hall, dirty clothes balled in a fist. He had every intention of hurling the ball at Sam, for fun, but when he reached the end of the hall, he could hear them in tense conversation, and the urge to eavesdrop turned out to be stronger. He held back and waited.

"…am just so sorry for the way I treated you," Sam was saying, "I was pretty much a completely different person." He sounded miserable.

"You were a sociopath," Lucille replied; "people don't tend to just grow out of that."

"That's… that's fair. It's—look, it's too weird to explain, but what you saw wasn't me," Sam was insisting. "I mean, it was me, but me minus… empathy. Feeling. I'm not saying I'm not still screwed up, because I am— _all_ kinds of screwed up—but I was barely human, when I met you. I can't believe you put up with even half the messed up crap you put up with from me."

That piqued Dean's interest.

"Well, I'm a big girl. But at least sixty, seventy percent of what I put up with was exactly what I was looking for. It's not all on you, sugar."

"Just the other thirty to forty percent," Sam extrapolated. "The really messed up crap. Like—like in here, and with the knife—"

Dean's eyes flew wide.

"—Well, the knife part turned out all right," Lucille said, actually placating Sam about—what, pulling a knife on her?—"but… baiting me about my husband was pretty low."

Dean frowned at the wall. Was Lucille married? He tried reviewing what he'd seen here so far for any signs of another (human) occupant of the house, but the bathroom and bedroom had struck him as firmly in the single woman category, and she didn't wear a ring. Divorcée? Widow?

A non-human occupant found Dean in the hall about then, and Dean tried to shoo the petite black cat away silently. It rubbed against his leg, instead, and he could feel the tickle starting to build in his face at the proximity. No, no, no—

"I'm so sorry," Sam was repeating, "that was completely out of line. I shouldn't have done any of it."

"Now," Lucille rebuffed gently, "don't go taking back all of it…" and there was no mistaking the heat in her tone.

'Aha!' Dean thought, vindicated, if a little discomforted. The cat meowed at him insistently, weaving back across his leg the other direction, so he mouthed, "I'm busy—go away," but didn't dare move and risk the wood floor creaking under him. Pressure was building behind his eyes, and he willed the Benadryl to work harder.

"Lucille…" Sam sounded so lost, then. 

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. The big brother urge to protect and comfort was trying to propel him into the kitchen, but he couldn't exactly get away with that, right now.

"Is there anything I can do?" Sam was asking, and there was a tone of pleading that made Dean's chest ache. "To make it up to you? I know there's no taking it back, but if you need to—I don't know, if you'd feel any better about things if you beat the shit out of me, I would totally understand."

Lucy laughed, at that. "Not really the side my bread is buttered on," she said, and there was something dirty in her tone, but something kind, too. "But hell, if it'd make you feel better, I'd do it. I'll have you know, I even—"

There was a sharp pause, then, and Dean recognized the non-sound of someone listening for someone else. Shit, shit, shit…

Lucille spoke, again, but it was too low for Dean to hear, especially over the eager purr the cat by his leg was now emitting. She even _what,_ he wondered?

"Oh, God, Lucille, you didn't," Sam said, scandalized, and Dean was even more put out to not have heard.

"I am what I am," she said, coquettish now. Maybe that meant Sam was forgiven. "Anyway, I didn't think he'd go for it, and I wasn't even sure it was you. Still, thought you should know I've got your back, however you behaved a lifetime ago."

"Two and a half years is hardly a lifetime," Sam argued, though Dean knew full well it could feel like it. Sam had been taken apart and put back together, in that time, had literally come back from hell, had seen yet another Apocalypse rise and fall, had left the life completely for a dog and a _girl_ , and Dean, well…

Dean's sneeze found its resolve and came on him so quickly he didn't have time to stifle it.

"Shit," he whispered to himself, out loud. The cat shot away, and Dean mumbled an apology for sneezing on it. But really, he had warned it.

There was nothing for it but to pretend and never let go of the lie. Dean steeled himself and strolled out into the kitchen, as though he were fresh from the bath.

"Something smells good, Luce," he said, too cheerfully. "Great bath, by the way, thank you."

Sam was studiously not looking at him. At least that meant Dean didn't have to endure that embarrassed and accusatory _I know what you were up to_ look.

"Who's this?" Sam said, instead, in the gentlest of his gentle voices, the one he reserved for small animals and small children. "Hey, there, who are you?" he went on, hand out to the black cat who was circling him at a slight distance, coy but interested. "Didn't meet you before," Sam babbled, "What's your name?"

"Luce," Dean said, loudly enough to be clear to everyone it was for Sam's benefit, "you're going to have to help him out, here, the suspense is killing him. He hasn't figured out that cats don't talk, yet. Because he's four. And slow."

Sam flipped him off with the hand not currently courting the sleek little inkblot that had loved Dean's leg so much. 'Slut,' Dean thought unkindly; it was suddenly shoving its face into Sam's giant paw like it was in love.

"That's Maeve," Lucille said, and Dean thought she might sound a little flustered. Maybe she was wondering what Dean had heard, too. "All right, now I really do believe you're a different person," she said to Sam. "Even Papa gave you the pig-eye, and he was more of a love than she is."

Dean frowned. How would Sam have met Lucille's father? What the hell would that have looked like?

"Is Papa—?" Sam started, and Lucille gave a short but significant look toward the wall behind him. Sam turned to follow the direction of her gaze, then went a little pale, determinedly returning his attention to the black cat. "I'm very sorry for your loss," he said, quickly and quietly.

Intrigued, Dean tried to casually ease his way further into the room, to get a look at whatever had set Sam off. He radiated nonchalance, he hoped. "Your turn for the bath, Sammy," he said, significantly, "don't want to keep this beautiful lady waiting for breakfast."

"Too late," Lucille cut in, though she gave Dean a look that said she appreciated the compliment. "Pretty much ready. So a bath'll have to wait if you don't want breakfast cold."

Sam was sitting at a little dining table near the wall that had apparently put him off, so Dean took up the chair across from his, to face the long shelves behind his brother. He couldn't tell, at first, what might have bothered him—they were crammed full of jars and bottles, the odd book, a couple of little figurines, and—

"That's… Papa," Dean said, before he could stop his mouth. A very clean white skull was tucked in amidst the jars—a cat if hoodoo and spellwork had taught him anything. Suddenly, he wished he had more clothing on.

"Part of him," Lucille said, with strained dignity. "He was better looking, when his hair was longer," she said, and though Dean thought it was a joke, she hadn't inflected it quite right to make it come off. "Like your brother," she added, and the sly hint in her tone there came off just fine.

"Hear that, Sammy?" Dean asked, weakly, grasping for the anchor that was teasing his brother. "She thinks you're prettier with your nice long chick hair." He reached to mess it up with a hand, partly in a bid to break the tension in the room, but partly because he couldn't help himself; Sam's hair had never been this long, before, ever, and when it rumpled, now, it _really_ rumpled. Dean had even seen Sam look as fluffed as a Pekingese, once, since they'd started settling in the bunker.

It couldn't hold a candle, mess-wise, to whatever was going on with Lucille's curls—sex hair ramped up by being chased by a ghost and nightmares, if he needed to hazard a guess—but Sam's hair was a charming car crash nonetheless, and Dean enjoyed it, whatever he might say about it. Sam swatted him away with what Dean took for an excessively defensive maneuver, but Dean couldn't keep from smiling.

"She thinks you're pretty," he re-emphasized, in a stage whisper. The Benadryl was making him dopey, he thought hazily, or else it was the desperate urge to normalize gone awry. "Like a little girl," he added, doubling down anyway.

An absurd little china cup of coffee clinked down in front of him, on a matching saucer. "Milk and sugar," Lucille said, indicating the center of the table with a wave of a finger. When she turned to head back to the stove, she did thread her fingers through Sam's hair as she passed, smoothing it absently.

There was a strange disquiet in Dean's gut, to see that. It felt a little like being on guard, or even jealous, but it felt too nebulous and without aim for that—a generalized jealousy, if that was possible, the sudden need to be the center of them, to be _between._ He didn't want Sam to have a part of Lucy he didn't, and more than that, he didn't want Lucy to have a part of _Sam_ that he didn't...

It was an uncomfortable thought, and Dean didn't let those see the light of day, anymore. "Got anything stronger to put in the coffee?" he asked, all false bravado. 

"Top shelf," Lucille replied, not looking back, "help yourself."

"Careful," Sam muttered, another cautioning made useless by its vagueness.

"That doesn't mean anything, Sam," he muttered back, "how am I supposed to be careful about something if you won't tell me what I'm supposed to be careful about?"

Sam rolled his eyes, then startled when the cat he'd ignored for a few seconds too long leapt into his lap, aggressively affectionate.

"Okay," Sam said, very quietly, once he'd regained his composure, petting the cat awkwardly. "If it's got a number on it, move on to the next bottle."

"Mmhmm," Lucille drawled. They hadn't been quiet enough. "Some of those aren't for beginners."

Dean scoffed, standing to look at the array. "Sweetheart, I'm about as far from beginner as it gets."

"Trust me," Lucille murmured, setting plates down on the table. "There's still a little Jameson's," she offered, kindly, "up behind the bottle shaped like a big naked lady."

Sam, so stiff and stuffy up to this point, failed to stifle a smile.

"Naked ladies sounds fun," Dean ventured, surreptitiously watching the two of them for a reaction. He hated being on the outside of in-jokes. _Between,_ he thought again.

"Not when I've got to get to work in an hour," Lucy said, sighing, and her regret sounded real. "Tell you what, though, you're still in town when I'm off tonight? I'll teach you all about damiana. Call it a second date," she added, significantly. 

The heat in Dean's face was not, could not be, blushing, but he turned his face toward the shelf to find the whiskey, just in case. He thought Sam might be the one trying to not get caught watching, this time. He didn't step in with an automatic refusal, though, a "no, we need to get back to Kansas, Toto," and the prospect of another night with Lucy, even if it was under a Benadryl haze, was enough to wake something low and hot in Dean's belly. 

Sam cleared his throat, and Dean frowned at him, but realized with sudden embarrassment that the towel wasn't doing much to obscure his… optimism. He snatched the bottle and sat down promptly, generously dosing his coffee with whiskey.

"Lucy," he said, too loudly, "this looks great. Sam—we can stay, right? One more night?" Sam looked pained, but when his mouth opened, no sound came out, so Dean slapped him encouragingly on the shoulder. "Yeah, sure we can. I can make us all dinner, or, Luce, you can put us to work on the, uh, the farm, here," he tried, waving in the direction he thought the rooster had been crowing from. "Just to say thank you for how, uh, great and hospitable you've been."

Lucy's green eyes were wavering between the two Winchesters, and Dean got the strangest feeling that this was the expression she'd wear looking at the dessert cart after a fancy dinner. He wanted to ask, "Pie or petits-fours?" but managed to keep it in with a big swallow of coffee.

After Lucy took a long look at Sam—and Dean had the strangest feeling she was daring him to object, too—she nodded. "Call it a date, then," she agreed, finally.

***

They ate in silence, apart from taking turns rebuffing Maeve when she tried to steal food. And, of course, apart from poorly controlled sounds of pleasure from Dean; Lucille had loaded his omelette generously with sharp cheese and hot peppers, and even found time to make him some home fries, spiked with sweet onion. She and Sam had some bizarrely healthy looking mix of fruit, instead of potatoes, bright with oranges and ruby pomegranate pips and something that looked maybe like pumpkin. Dean stole bites of it, occasionally, from each of them, and when he asked what all she'd put in it (apparently nutmeg and lemon zest were the secrets), he pretended he wasn't memorizing it for later. He was pretty sure she was preening under the attention either way.

Lucille beat Sam to the next bath, and she set Dean to undoing the "devil knots" (as she called them) that he'd left in her corset while she got herself together. Dean wasn't sure how much self-control it was taking Sam to not comment (he was on his knees sorting their laundry, determinedly not watching Dean work the knots), and he considered pushing buttons to see if he could break Sam's composure, but decided to be the bigger man. Mostly because Dean didn't want to wind up being the one who did the washing.

She must have been able to lace herself up—she managed every day, Dean figured—but with them there, she didn't bother. She came out of her bedroom all in black satin, and flipped the corset around (it was green and black Chinese brocade, on the other side), latching the busks over her belly, and then turned her back to Dean expectantly.

He shifted his chair so he could do it seated; he didn't need another look from Sam about his erection tenting the towel. "How…" His voice was too dry, all at once, and he coughed to clear his throat. "How tight do you want it?"

"Leave about an inch between the edges, please," she instructed politely. "And just bows this time, unless you can promise me you'll undo the knots yourself tonight."

Well, that was a challenge if he'd ever heard one. He hauled against the laces and went straight for the sailor's knots. She grunted, and it wasn't a pretty sound, but it did something delicious to him, anyway. When he finished, he gave her hips a little bracing squeeze, filling it with promise.

"Thank you," she said, just a little breathily. 

She finished up, pinning her barely-tamed hair into place with a wicked looking comb he thought was made of ivory and abalone (which made Sam blanch in a way Dean resolved to ask about later), stained her lips with something pomegranate-colored out of a little compact, and hurriedly scrawled a little list of to-do's at Dean's urging.

"Don't let the cats out by accident," she emphasized, though it was written at the top of the list. "And can either of you change a fanbelt on a '68 Beetle?"

"A two year old could change the fanbelt on a '68 Beetle," Dean said, dismissively.

"I realize," Lucy said, a touch sulkily. "I just haven't had the time lately. She's under the carport," she added, primly, with a point in the general direction. "Be gentle with her; she's not like me, she doesn't like it rough."

Dean groaned out loud, that time. "It's not fair to say something like that and then just leave," he complained.

"Gotta earn a living," she said, by way of apology. "See you around 6:30." She kissed him goodbye, then, slow, and he decided he forgave her. Then she bent in half to tip Sam's face up in her hands, and kissed him exactly the same.

She left without another word. Both brothers sat for a few long, uncomfortable moments, after that, staring out the front door after her, mouths a little purple from her kisses.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean wondered why he'd even bothered bathing, by the time they broke for lunch. 

It was stupid, but he and Sam had fallen into one of their "competitive about nothing" modes as the morning had gone on, and more got done as a result than had any business getting done. Dean was grumbling to himself about it, but as it had probably started when Dean said Sam should be sure to hang up the wet wash nice and pretty on the line while the real men did real work, he guessed he'd started it. In Dean's defense, Sam took offense at the weirdest things, sometimes. The 'real men' line had started him chopping a stack of logs into firewood, and Dean had been calling him Paul Bunyan since, mostly because Dean hadn't turned out to be as good at it when he gave it a go, and needed to defuse his feeling of inadequacy.

He'd found a less dirty pair of pants to work in and replaced the fanbelt on the bug—an elegant little piece of work, for a chick car, he thought privately, with a well-cared-for, sparkling dark green coat of paint—and then gone ahead and given her a tune-up and detailing just because that was the kind of guy Dean was. If he played around with the iPod on the dash while he worked, what was the harm? (It was more eclectic than anything, if obscenely short on arena rock, but the sheer number and variety of playlists devoted to raunch-oriented music impressed him. "Sexy Seventies" turned out to be his favorite, though it ran toward the psychedelic, with "Blood Sex and Booze" coming in a surprise close second.) 

Sam had somehow convinced Dean to shovel sheep shit from the big fenced-in yard into the smaller fenced-in garden, after that (he didn't want to work inside around the cats, did he?), and Dean had had to have a heartfelt conversation with the ladies responsible for that mess about why they'd had to leave it all over. On the plus side, he had figured out where the grey fluff Lucille had been spinning came from: a strangely evil looking little ewe that didn't come much past his knee, with sharp little black horns horns and an inky face and feet. He privately dubbed her Devil Doll.

Sam had him at a disadvantage, having apparently gotten an idea of how this backyard zoo worked a few years previously, and so managed to trick Dean into trying to take eggs out from under what looked like a dark grey feather duster. The duster had turned out to be a brooding chicken with a mean little beak who didn't want to give up her nest, and Dean had gone scrambling away with nasty peck-marks on his hands. Sam had laughed at him long and hard enough that Dean had been willing to waste one of the eggs he'd collected earlier as a projectile, smashing it over Sam's head. "That's good conditioner, Sam!" he'd hollered when Sam stomped off to rinse his head under the hose, and wondered if he'd made a tactical error when Sam shot him with cold water. Still, it had warmed up into the mid-60s, and it was sweaty work, so he didn't mind too much, all told.

They'd gotten through their list by noon, and that was when the competitive tasks had more or less developed a mind of their own. Sam had fixed the poorly fitting gate into the vegetable garden, so Dean had oiled the hinges on the doors in and out of the house and rehung a screen door that wasn't doing its best work, anymore. Dean had swept off the little concrete pad outside the backdoor, under the deep eaves, so Sam had started cleaning the rain gutters. Dean bullied him away and took over the gutters ("man's work"), so Sam swept and dust-mopped the floors in the house, ran a carpet sweeper over the rugs, and washed dishes. Eventually, Sam had yelled to ask if he was ready for lunch, and Dean had said something clever like, "Yeah, bitch, make me a sammich!" but the sandwich had turned out to be amazing, actually, so he'd thanked him a little sheepishly, and then started a conversation about how 'sheepish' was a weird word for what it meant, especially if Devil Doll and her evil eye were anything to go by.

In another couple of hours, they'd washed windows, dusted the house (Sam), repaired window screens (Dean), made an embarrassingly filthy beer run, and thoroughly cleaned Baby to make up for it. Neither of them was willing to bring up what they expected from the evening ahead, but they each took suspiciously long baths, before Lucille got home, and Dean caught Sam checking his hair more than once when he'd chanced on his reflection in a kettle or a window. Dean didn't mention it, but only because he'd had to spend longer than usual trying to get his hair to behave with only the weak control Lucy's labelless conditioner was giving him, and he was pretty sure Sam had noticed but not commented.

Neither was sure what to do with himself, so Sam went and tossed feed to the chickens and muttered something about finding a video of how to milk sheep on youtube, so Dean wished him well and made sure he had a good view through the window for when Sam was inevitably impaled on the horns of an angry mini-sheep. He couldn't find a stereo in his cursory check (or a TV, or a landline, or a router, or a computer…) so he borrowed the iPod and its little speaker dock from the Beetle and brought it in to keep him entertained while he cooked. He started "Sexy Seventies" up, and raised a beer when Freddie Mercury promised that tonight, he was going to have himself a real good time.

(He guessed, given the playlist, that Lucille probably hadn't bought that Dean's last name was Mercury. But since Sam had probably given her a completely unrelated name a few years before, he wrote it off as a lost cause, anyway.)

Dean rooted around in cabinets and the fridge and freezer. Without meat he was out of his element, but he eventually found a stockpile of homemade marinara in jars and was able to get to work on penne with marinara, chard, mushrooms, and chili peppers (he was going to grate some of the hard cheese on it if it stood up to it). He started garlic bread to go with, and once Sam had given up on getting kicked by the ewe, Dean had him fetch greens and carrots from Lucille's garden so he could put together a salad "for the girls in the room."

"No means no, Sam," Dean had reminded him, when Sam sat down again to ice his bruising shins. 

"You're very funny," Sam had muttered, but seemed to forgive all when Dean handed him a beer. 

As time ticked down to the finish, Sam made one last valiant attempt to resuscitate the awkward conversation he'd been more or less trying to have all day, on and off--the one where he prodded Dean about whether Lucy could still be a witch or some as-yet-unidentified creature. No, Dean hadn't seen anything suspicious; no, Dean didn't think the luddite setup was proof she was out of her home era—she had an iPod, for God's sake, which even Dean didn't have; yeah, he'd seen some odd occult-looking shit, but nothing that was any weirder than any harmless small-town Wiccan would have. "That one sheep and the tree out front are spooky as hell, though," he admitted. 

"You haven't seen the boxes of random animal bones in her shed," Sam said, darkly.

Dean paused in sautéing mushrooms, the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. "You didn't think to lead with that one?"

"She makes jewelry and crap out of them," Sam explained, though he sounded unconvinced. "That comb she puts in her hair? I'm pretty sure it started out life as a ribcage."

Dean grimaced into the pan. He couldn't decide whether he'd take a closer look at it later or actively avoid doing so.

"Anyway," Sam hedged, "they're sorted by size and shape, not by animal, so it's not exactly a smart setup for hoodoo..."

"All right," Dean said, rubbing the back of his neck and trying not to be too creeped out by that. "Some witchcraft might work that way," he allowed, reluctantly taking up the gambit. He could overlook a lot of foibles for a good lay, but boxes of bones...

"You said everything about her seems centered around the 1860 mark, right?" Dean asked, and Sam nodded. "Ever get the feeling she hexed or bewitched you, when you were here before?"

Sam frowned. "I didn't feel like it at the time, but you usually don't. And it was… while I was like that," he said, obliquely, "so like you said, my instincts were shot to hell."

Dean grunted agreement, testing a noodle for doneness. "Find any hex bags, grimoires...?"

"No, though plenty of herbs and bones she could make hex bags _from._ And--" Here Sam rose to go over to the shelves, studiously avoiding looking at Papa's skull. "Her cookbooks." 

Dean rolled his eyes, but when Sam pulled down a couple of old looking leather-bound notebooks, he got what Sam meant. They weren't Necronomicon creepy, but they didn't look like the fakes the sensitive poetry geeks picked up in big box bookstores, either. "What's in 'em?" Dean asked, reaching out a hand for one. Pasta still needed another minute, anyway.

"Recipes for medicinal liquors and teas, mostly, lots of salves." Sam handed over one of the notebooks, flipping through another. "Bobby thought they were legit folk medicine, not particularly evil. But she took something from one of them, acted like a barbiturate. It knocked her out cold for hours."

Dean paused in thumbing past a few recipes ("#49 Numb," "#50 For Illness," "#51 In Flowers") and frowned. "On purpose?" 

"On purpose," Sam agreed, "but she took too much of it. Or for too long, I guess. This one," he said, when he found it, pushing the page in front of Dean. He squinted down at the ingredients. Nothing too exotic. Nothing it would be hard to get their hands on...

"We could use something like that," Dean admitted.

"Dean," Sam scolded, but he didn't make eye contact. Dean bet he'd thought it, too.

"Whatever. Copy it down, dude." He dropped the notebook on the counter and turned back to the stove.

"So let's just say she's cooking meth in the bathtub. Not really our department," Dean said, over his shoulder, checking the sauce. "Any spellwork in those? 'Fountain of youth' stuff? Or, hey, has she aged, since you were here last?"

"Yeah," Sam admitted. "I think so. And she's put on probably fifteen, twenty pounds."

"Sammy… You know any self-respecting single witch would let herself get softer and older?" Dean asked, like he was explaining something to a small child.

"No," Sam said, miserably. "I—you're right, it's just… It's so weird. Right? She's been in the room twice when a ghost decided to go off the reservation for the first time in a hundred years. Who does that happen to?"

"Us," Dean said, though more to play devil's advocate than anything else. "Mediums. People in New England. Or, Idunno, maybe she's like a lightning rod. Remember, couple years back there was that story about a woman who kept blowing up appliances because she just carried too much electromagnetic energy? Maybe there's like a… a ghost equivalent. Or some bad juju has rubbed off on her from those boxes of bones. You check for EMF?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah, blips here and there on the bones, but nothing that really screamed."

Dean nodded slowly, weighing it out in his mind. A witch worth her salt wouldn't knock herself out on her own potions, or let herself fade like a mortal, or let a soulless kid push her around with a knife. But not much said hoodoo like animal bones and an apothecary setup. Still, if there were really something there, wouldn't Sam have found it? Sam--the _real_ Sam--could be soft on a sympathetic monster, but Robo-Sam shot first and asked questions later. His instincts might have been weak, but he got to the bottom of things, ruthlessly if need be.

"Sammy," Dean said carefully, "tell me the truth and I'll take you at your word. If there were really something messed up going on with her, do you think there's any way you wouldn't have gotten it nailed down?"

Sam looked torn, but Dean thought there was something soft underneath, too, and he was pretty sure Sam had heard what he hadn't managed to say out loud: that even on his worst day, Sam was too good a hunter to get hoodwinked.

It seemed to soothe something in Sam, which soothed something in Dean. He still didn't look entirely convinced, but the door opened to the clicking of heels, and Sam surreptitiously put the notebooks and ice pack away. When he sat back down, Dean could see that his face was clearer and calmer. Satisfied they weren't in danger, then. And if Sam didn't think they were in danger, well... 

Dean tried not to look too eager, but he watched Lucille for a reaction from the corner of his eye. She froze in the entryway, staring agape at her non-sticking door, at the clean windows, the shining floors... She seemed overcome. 

Dean tossed a smug look back at Sam. "We done good," he mouthed, and Sam tried to suppress a grin. 

When the cowbell broke in on her iPod, though, Lucille's reverie shifted and slithered down into her hips. She came on like a snake, gliding into the kitchen, steps slowed to click in rhythm with "Honky Tonk Woman."

"I didn't know you boys did windows, too," she said, faintly, her hips still moving after her feet had stopped.

"We're pretty handy," Dean said with a wink. "If there's a ginger barroom queen to impress."

She laughed, a low rumble, and swiveled like she couldn't control it. There was a surreal moment, when she looked like she was coming apart—her hands drifted over her head, her hair began to tumble down, and her curvy little body became a sine wave of raunch, her skirt swishing around below her knees. Dean barely remembered to turn off the stove. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sam was staring, too, transfixed.

He couldn't ruin dinner. He _couldn't._ Dean kicked himself into action and strained the pasta as quickly as he could without scalding himself (much), and dumped it into the sauce. Once it was stirred together, he could go back to watching her dance; she seemed unlikely to stop before the song ended. 

When he had almost finished stirring, Lucille sidled up to Dean's hip, in under the arm with the beer (instead of the marinara-covered spoon), leaned up onto her tip-toes to kiss him just below the ear. She was singing along, and her "'Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind…'" raised all the hairs on the back of his neck. Or maybe it was the way her hips kept gyrating, even when his body was in the way of their warpath. He slid the pan off the burner, and abandoned the spoon and beer to sling his arms down around her waist, slip a knee between hers. He tried to grind in time with her, and it lasted most of the chorus, but then she was off and twisting again with no one but herself.

Dean had seen dirtier dancing in bars a few times, but not by much. Lucy's hands were roving her own body, here and there gathering her skirts for a twitch, or hitching them up over her deeply bent knees. Sam wasn't spared her attention, though, and eventually Dean tore his eyes away from how Sam was closing his eyes and leaning his cheek into Lucille's hands like a cat. Dean begged his beer to help make this okay. When it was empty, he thought it might just be. Barely. 

Dean fumbled to stop the music with the last notes, a little afraid of what would happen if the playlist kept going. There was a faint susurrus in the room, of uneven and heavy breathing and the settling whisper of satin as Lucille wound down into stillness. She looked spent, and collapsed in one of the chairs set around the table.

Dean cleared his throat, awkwardly. "Anyone ready for dinner?"


	5. Chapter 5

Everyone ate too fast. Conversation was limited, mostly just Lucille prompting them to tell her everything they'd done and praising them for it, and when her plate was cleared she apologized for Tabitha's poor cooperation and went to milk the sheep herself. Dean washed up while Sam poured everyone generous tumblers of what Dean was calling "naked lady drinks" and then scrolled through the iPod like it was an impossible object from the future—at least in the context of this house, this woman. 

"Obscene Oughts. Blood, Sex, and Booze," Sam read, disbelieving, from the list of playlists.

"That one's pretty dirty," Dean said, failing to keep the delight out of his voice. "Way too kinky for me, but still kinda hot, in a scary way." The expected "TMI" scolding didn't come, and Dean wondered again what was in store. He was certain it was better not to ask, and just let what would happen happen; ruminating on it could only lead to suffering.

"Dean, what… what the hell are we doing here?" Sam asked, then, because he was required by law to mess with a good thing by overthinking it.

"Whatever the nice lady wants, Sam," Dean said tersely, trying to shut him down. "If you can put away your Boy Scout spurs for like a minute and a half, that is."

"Boy Scout…" Sam repeated, trying to parse it. "That didn't make any sense, you realize that?"

"Shut up," Dean muttered, "you know what I meant."

"You know that they don't have spurs, right?" Sam persisted, eyebrows knit in pretend concern. "What is it you think Boy Scouts do?"

It was brother-typical harassment, but it soothed Dean's soul. If Sam was ready to tease him, he wasn't ready to bolt. "I dunno, build campfires? Have unhealthy relationships with Scout Leaders?"

"And something with spurs, apparently," Sam reminded him.

"Will you—Just shut up and drink your naked lady drink, Sam," Dean said, but there was no venom in it. Giddiness was coming over him and he couldn't suppress a grin.

"Are you sure?" Sam asked, finally, anyway, and there was something in it Dean couldn't identify, something tense and nebulous, like he was asking something else altogether.

"Am I sure about what? I'm sure I want to get laid," Dean said, shortly. "I'm sure so does she, and so do you. And I'm sure we can work something out where nobody leaves with any psychological scarring, okay?"

Sam snorted.

"Any _new_ emotional scarring," Dean corrected.

"But what—I mean, shouldn't there be, like, boundaries set ahead of time? Some basic groundrules—?"

Dean was spared having to shut that down as the _worst_ possible way to handle it by Lucy coming in the backdoor with a small pail that had only a little milk in the bottom. "Hope she didn't butt you too hard," she said to Sam, rushing and breathless. "She's drying off and getting a little testy about the whole process." She had the pail in the fridge and a covered dish out in moments. "You two head into the living room while I feed the cats." She nudged a ceramic plate on the floor with her foot, and that was enough to get three furry streaks shooting in and around her ankles.

"Sammy, grab the bottle," Dean instructed, collecting his drink and the iPod and dock. He was having a lot less trouble from his allergies since Sam had scrubbed down the house, but he didn't intend to chance staying close to the source for long.

While Dean was looking for an electrical outlet to plug the dock into, Sam plunked the naked lady bottle on the coffee table and laid out woven coasters for their glasses. He took up in a cushy looking armchair to one side of it, opposite a Victorian loveseat that Dean figured was reserved for he and Lucille. He wasn't going to complain. Sam was looking pensive, staring into his glass.

Dean turned back on the 70's playlist, although at a less intrusive volume. He had to balance it on a bookshelf, in front of a stack of what he was pretty sure was all erotic poetry, and he smirked to himself. The photography on the walls was more his speed than poetry, but the theme seemed to be the same—sexual and tinged with decadence, darkness. The photos were all small sepia or black-and-white prints, retro nudes of lush women from the Victorian era through maybe the silent film era, with a few outright pornographic shots of women tangled together or in bondage or striking each other with bundles of reeds. "Awesome," he said, under his breath, grinning to himself. He'd seen far more outrageous shots, before, of course, but there was something subversive and exciting about seeing it set in such a prudish era, like the first edition Voluptuous Asian Lovelies mags he'd found in the Bunker. And that it belonged to the girl he was getting ready to make it with, rather than himself, didn't hurt.

"Hey, Luce, this one looks like you," he called, peering close.

"Which one?" She was coming in from the kitchen, sipping at her drink, but Sam beat her to Dean's side.

"This one, with the uh, big feather fan and the stockings," Dean said.

"Oh!" Lucille laughed, and went to sprawl on the loveseat. "That's because it is." 

Sam gave Dean a look that was all warning.

"Really?" Dean asked, with false calm. "When was it, uh—when was it taken?" 

"Maybe three, four years ago," Lucille said. "Don't tell anyone in town, but the photographer who does the 'period pieces' for tourists will do 'period erotica,' too, if you catch him after hours. It's a good fake, isn't it? A little too crisp some places, but it's definitely passable."

"Yeah, I see what you mean," Dean said, significantly, turning his best "you're a dumbass" look on his brother. Sam's jaw squared hard, and he kept looking at the photo anyway, as if willing it to prove itself genuinely old. In another minute, though, he'd given it up as a bad job, a tinge of embarrassment crossing his face as he retreated to the armchair.

"Girl on the couch here looks a little like you, too," Dean offered, appreciatively.

"You think?" Lucille was giving him soft, sweet eyes while unlacing her boots. 

"Absolutely," he said, doubling down at the first sign of encouragement. "You're easily as hot as any girl up on this wall. Hotter," he added, because he wasn't an idiot, whatever Sam might say. (Sam was clearly unimpressed by Dean's flirtation. Still, he was drinking, and that should loosen him up.) 

Dean joined Lucille on the loveseat, throwing an arm around her easily, and she slipped an arm up his chest, curling her fingers back around his neck, cozying in.

"What should I call you?" she asked, apropos of nothing as far as Dean could tell. He thought she was looking at Sam.

Sam colored faintly. "Sam is fine," he said.

"Wait a minute," Dean said, "I thought—Sammy, you didn't even give her a name?"

"Not my real name, Dean," Sam said, stiffly.

Oh. Right. 

"I'm guessing your last names aren't Mercury or Galt, either," Lucille said, just a little wryly, into her glass. "But I don't need to know what it is," she added quickly, like she thought it might get her an 'if I tell you I'll have to kill you.' Neither Winchester contradicted her. 

"Dean," she said, after a long draw from her drink, "you asked about the damiana earlier."

Had he? 

"The 'naked lady drink,'" Sam reminded him with a faint smile.

"Right. Yes," Dean said. He sniffed it curiously.

"This," she said, swirling the light gold contents around her glass, "is sugar cane rum infused with roots and herbs known to be beneficial to mood and libido. Damiana, especially, but there are a handful of others. Red ginseng, horny goat weed…"

"An aphrodisiac," Dean translated, and when Lucy nodded, he made eye contact and immediately took a generous gulp, not that he particularly felt like he needed to be seduced. It felt like sweet burning, going down, just a little bit spicy, and the heat felt like it didn't want to dissipate. He could get used to that. "Beats the hell out of oysters," he said, after another sip.

"Agreed," Lucy said, a sly little smile on her lips. "To a pleasant evening," she toasted, and the brothers echoed it and clinked their glasses.

***

After half a tumbler and a particularly low and throbbing recording of "One of These Nights" (or maybe it just felt more low and throbbing than usual after enough damiana), Lucy said, "At the risk of running you beautiful boys off…"

" _Now_ you're worried about that?" Sam said, eyes a little wide but smiling.

Lucille pouted slightly, but she was smiling, too. "I thought I'd been pretty well behaved up 'til this point. Today, anyway."

"Don't listen to him, Luce," Dean said, nosing up against her hair. "We're made of sterner stuff than that."

"You say that now," she said, but the shyness he thought she was aiming for didn't come off. It sounded more like a challenge.

"Try me," Dean said, always up for one.

"I was just wondering what I'd done right in my wicked little life to get two handsome beasts drinking in my parlor at the same time."

"Why would that run us off?" Dean prompted, stroking her arm through her sleeve. 

"Because maybe my next thought was that, if you weren't brothers, I'd be trying to get you drunk enough to kiss one another."

Dean swallowed down at the lump strangling his throat. Weakly, he said, "Yeah, well, I'm sure Sammy's too square for that." He was not above throwing his brother under the bus when sex was on the line. He didn't dare look at him, though.

"That mean you're not?" Lucy asked, and her voice had gone breathy. She leaned her head back on his shoulder, sliding one hand up into his hair, and it bared her cleavage hypnotically.

Dean couldn't find the words, somehow. It was one thing implying he'd do it (he had no intention to), but another saying it outright, out loud. He didn't want to walk back to Kansas when Sam took offense and went home without him, for one. But the look on her face, the short, sharp breaths making her breasts rise and fall, made him want to lie for her. He'd told so many lies to get into girls' pants, just not usually when the potential fallout was four feet away.

Hoping it would pretend at the right answer while failing to commit to it, Dean closed the distance between their faces, kissing Lucille slowly. She melted into him, fingers tripping feather-light over his skin in time with the psychedelia on the speakers. Then there was movement on the edges of his vision, the faint sound of steps and the creak of the loveseat, and she moaned into Dean's mouth; her eyes were closed, so he chanced looking up in time to see Sam sinking in behind her, bowed over deep to kiss her shoulder, her neck. 

There was a strange feeling, then, some jumbled mix of fear and anticipation, lust and ache all wrestling for dominance. The proud-older-brother part of Dean wanted to give Sam a high five for letting go and just getting some, simple and easy and unfrought. But then there was the part of Dean that still watched Sam whenever they packed for a hunt, counting shirts and eyeing for mementos to make sure Sam hadn't brought enough with him for a permanent flight. The bone-deep anxiety that Sam might be bailing on him—again—was never far away, these days, especially when there was a girl involved. 

This girl, though—Sam seemed scared half to death of this girl, had to only be staying here and going along with it for Dean's sake, and there was a little thrill of power Dean felt from that, an implied promise. If Sam would stay for this, maybe he'd really just _stay,_ this time, even when it crossed taboos, even when it scared him. Maybe he would stay just for Dean. It made something warm flood his skin, something protective and possessive, even if he'd never name it that way. And if it wasn't quite comfortable for those feelings to sit so close alongside the hunger and lust for the woman sandwiched between them, well, he'd keep drinking until the cognitive dissonance broke down. 

Sam's hair tickled Dean's cheek, and that was a little _too_ close, so he broke the kiss long enough to finish his tumbler in a few long gulps. Courage. Lucille bent her face into his shoulder, then, mouthing over his jugular, and that left Dean's face with nowhere to go when he turned back but in between, with Sam's face to his left and Lucille's to his right. He hovered, paralyzed. 

Lucille laid a hand over the back of his skull, first cradling, then pressing, and made the choice to move for him. She drew him down against her neck, and he kissed and bit where he landed, just under her jawline, even though it meant he was almost cheek to cheek with his brother, their mouths working an inch or two apart on Lucille's neck. (Thank God Sam had shaved close, so at least there was no burn of stubble-on-stubble.) Sam made a sound, then, soft, and his big hands were sliding around Lucille's ribs, one down onto her hip and the other up over a breast, so Dean did the sensible thing and laid his own eager palms over her other hip and other breast. When she broke off from Dean's shoulder to lay her head back in a moan, he took advantage and carefully drew his face out from between the two of theirs, to get the safer side of her throat. 

It was a delicate dance, after that, one of carefully marked territories. When one brother ate into the other's space, the other shifted away to accommodate, reaching out to make up the loss on some other battleground. The boundaries fluctuated across Lucille's body in a strange parody of war, and the Winchesters almost never touched. Almost. 

But Lucille's hands were greedy, and the drink was taking hold, so the lines began to blur, the edges going soft. She would pull one of Dean's arms until it wrapped around her waist, and then do something to Sam that made him draw closer to her, pinning Dean's arm between Sam's chest and Lucille's back. One of Sam's hands would skate down one of Lucille's thighs, only stopping when his fingertips bumped Dean's knee, and he'd pull back, but not quite far enough to break the contact entirely. So if, when Dean's hand roved over Lucille's comparatively coarse red curls, they wound up brushing against a lock of softer, finer hair as they did, Dean didn't bother about that too much, either.

The closer their bodies all got, the sweeter the sounds that came out of Lucille. Sweeter still when she finally formed words, managed, "Clothes—off—everyone—" and no one objected.

She stumbled off of the loveseat to her feet, so she could give Dean her back. He'd forgotten about the knots. "Sorry," he said, though he wasn't particularly, and while he unknotted them and worked the edges apart, he could see Sam refilling all the glasses. He didn't need any more convincing to have another, and drank half of it down carelessly while Lucille wiggled between them to get her top and skirt out of the way.

Sam's fingers went like a homing device to the back of one of her thighs, and he took a breath so sharp it was almost a hiss. Dean willed his eyes to focus on the space beneath Sam's fingers, where a few tiny bright white scars were only partially obscured by her stockings and garter belt. He wondered if that was the work of the knife he'd heard about earlier.

"What?" Lucille asked, and sounded dazed, dizzy, swiveling her head around to try to see where they were looking. "What's—Oh," she said, when she could tell, and sounded relieved. She stroked a hand fondly over Sam's hair, then gently pressed his head down below the curve of her bottom. "So kiss it better."

"It won't…" Sam began, but laid brief kisses over each little scar anyway.

She pet his hair sweetly while he kissed. "There," she said, simply, when he had finished, "now you're forgiven."

The intimacy there—the certainty that something full of pain had happened between them, and that Dean would probably never really understand it, something about _Sam_ —made the strange jealous feeling rear up again. He was so hard it hurt, and his brain was swimming with lust, but he gathered his wits together enough to grip Sam's shoulder, to shake it until Sam looked up. "You okay, Sammy?" he asked, and it was inadequate, but Dean willed Sam to understand how much love and fierceness was behind it. He tried to convey with his grip and his eyes that he would leave here with Sam right now if Sam needed to, would take him home, would do—would do anything for him. Dean would take the entire world apart, for Sam.

Sam swallowed, worked his jaw and throat a little, but didn't find words. His eyes were a little too sharp, but his face was softening, and he nodded once. Dean gripped the back of Sam's neck, then, firm and fond and with the promise of safety. "Good," he said, then again, softer, "good. Have a drink, relax—everything's okay, man."

"Okay," Sam echoed, faintly, but he seemed to be grounding, again, coming back to the moment and to himself. He did what Dean suggested, even drank heavily enough to surprise Dean a little, then set his tumbler down with a determined clink and pulled off his shirt.

"All right," Dean encouraged him, and managed to get his own shirt off just as Lucille landed on her knees on the sofa between them, this time chest to chest with Sam, so the gaping laces were open to Dean. She'd taken off everything but her corset, her garter belt and fishnets, and the black velvet choker at her throat.

"Tie me up," she said, an echo of the night before, and now that Dean knew what it meant, his eyes rolled up into his head in anticipation, and he gathered the laces up in his fists.

"Yes, ma'am. This—Sammy, you should probably watch this," he advised, because he was the older brother, and that made him wiser in the world than Sam. He thought, suddenly, that Sam had probably already seen this transformation, years before Dean had, and the thread of jealousy started to tug, but Sam obediently shifted back so he could watch, and his look of embarrassed intrigue suggested this was new to him. Dean felt a potent mix of relief and thrill, then, and power, as he began to change the shape of the body beneath him with nothing but his fists and some clever fabric.

"Wow," Sam said, faintly, laying his fingers over Lucille's waist even as Dean made it smaller. Dean paused midway, looking over Lucille's shoulder to Sam, this time, for feedback. When Sam caught his look, Dean canted his eyebrows up and mouthed, "More?" and Sam's mouth parted in shock, his pupils widening suddenly. He nodded, and croaked, "More," eyes darting between Dean's face and Lucille's waist as Dean obeyed.

Lucy was letting out little panting breaths, hitching and rising in pitch. Whether it was the filth factor of two men deciding how tight her corset would be, instead of her, or something else, Lucy seemed even more turned on by this now than she had the first time. Her thighs were getting slick and wet, and Dean and Sam both breathed long and deep at that scent, that perfect and delicious smell that was entirely female.

Dean kept himself barely in control, and only tightened the corset by an inch before pausing. He asked Sam to render judgment again, his "More?" coming out on what sounded like a growl, and he felt a surge of something hot in his gut. (He had to consciously resist dissecting that reaction, but Sam appeared to be having a similar one, so Dean figured—hoped—insisted—everything must be kosher somehow or other.) When Sam replied, "More," darker and firmer this time, the heat compounded, and he took another inch.

They were running out of waist to conquer, but Sam didn't wait to be asked, this time. "More," he said, again, when Dean paused, and Dean could see his fingers running up and down Lucille's sides, his eyes roving continuously between her waist, her face, Dean's face. Dean obliged, and watched Sam more than anything else. There was only an inch left before the sides would meet and Lucille would be on that delicate knifepoint. 

"One more?" he asked, ready to push right up against the edge if Sam wanted him to. 

Sam nodded, and Lucille groaned before Dean even moved. 

Lucille wasn't strong enough to keep from pulling back toward him, when he pulled again, so he ordered, "Sammy, hold her," and Sam's grip turned to iron in an instant. It was enough, and when Dean leaned back and put his weight into it, she stayed exactly where she was, and the corset closed, a solid stretch of emerald and black unbroken by skin. He didn't trust his bows to hold something so taut, so Dean went for the trusty sailor's knots again, and just hoped he'd remember to help her get them undone before he and his brother left her in the morning.

"Fuck," Lucille let out on a creaking whisper, and she bowed back as far as the corset and Sam's grip would allow, neck arced so far that Dean could see her face, the mingled pain and delight and her wide open mouth. He gathered her hair in his hands, held her head, and shifted up to one knee so he could bend over her, kissing her upside-down, licking her tongue, nipping her bottom lip.

Though it brought them dangerously close to one another, Sam took advantage of her arched body, too, bending to nip marks over the tops of her breasts and on her throat around the choker. He drew back shortly, though, first trying to flatten down on his belly on the loveseat, but when he ran out of room, he shifted to get on the floor on his knees, instead. Dean understood quickly that he was looking for the angle where he could go down on her while she was in this position.

His insides tangled in some mad mambo, and he let go of Lucille with one hand to fish out the condom he'd planted in his back pocket. He tore the foil with his teeth, and Lucy had some kind of paroxysm, her hands gripping blindly back at him. 

Dean nudged Lucille back upright, so he could flatten his chest against her back and get both hands free while still keeping her supported. He wished he'd gotten further in undressing, but he managed to get his jeans open and the latex over his dick, now brutally hard and butting up between her thighs.

"Watch out, Sam," he warned, not wanting to be responsible for taking out one of his eyes if they got their signals crossed, and over Lucy's writhing body he saw Sam draw back just enough that he'd be safe. Dean gripped himself and carefully slid through the lush wetness of her until he found his place, and sank in deeply. He couldn't suppress a low, satisfied groan.

Dean planted one hand on the back of the loveseat for balance, and the other on Lucy, now roving over her breasts, now down a thigh, now spread flat over her belly. Once he had her pressed back against him, and was still, Sam made his move, gripping her hips in his hands and craning his face into her pussy with a look of pure bliss.

"You taste amazing," Sam whispered fervently against her, after a moment, and Dean got one of those flares of misplaced pride that his brother was turning out to be a devoted practitioner of the cunnilingual arts. (Dean had had nothing to do with that, as far as he knew, but he took most of the credit for raising Sam, and this was more proof that Sam had been raised right.) Lucille seemed to enjoy it, too, sagging against Dean and moaning. 

When Sam's tongue plunged in and his mouth sealed over Lucy's clit, Dean risked an experimental rock of his hips, and Lucy, previously boneless, spasmed around him. Her arms wrapped back around his neck with sudden purpose, hands locked to one another, her head rolling aimlessly on his shoulder. "Yes, _yes,_ " she was whispering, and it sounded like a prayer, fervent and exalted.

Dean rocked as slowly and easily as he could, but he couldn't believe this would last very long, even with the distraction from having to remain upright on his knees on the cushion, and the unyielding awareness of how his thighs were bumping up against Sam's fingers every time he moved. Dean slid his free hand up her body, laying it _gently_ over her throat to try to bring her along, too, but he was shocked when Lucille went rigid in what seemed like only moments, her keening little cries escalating quickly, like her orgasm was taking her by surprise. He pressed just a little harder over her throat, moved his hips a little faster, and tried not to notice the pressure of Sam's chin when it grazed the underside of his dick as Sam worked his mouth, and then Lucy was gone on a wild, howling cry.

Dean slowed to a halt, to let her come down, and it looked like Sam had gone still, too. One of Lucy's arms came free from Dean's neck, falling loosely to her side, but after an effort she brought it up to Sam's skull, trembling fingers drifting into his hair at the same time her other hand spread against Dean's. It was somehow like feeling in stereo, seeing her doing to Sam what he could feel her doing to him. He felt bigger than his body; he felt a part of the both of them, in a feedback loop of touch and sensation.

Lucy's panting changed to a hiss and she bucked suddenly, both hands curling to grip the hair beneath them. Dean was pretty sure Sam had moved, because Dean hadn't; Sam's eyes were open, now, glassy and dark, unfocused, but there was a glint of satisfaction in them when she bucked again, too sensitive for the tongue on her clit. Dean couldn't tell if Sam was making eye contact with either of them, or both, or neither. He wasn't sure it mattered. He watched his brother's face. He held Lucy up, so she wouldn't fall right off the loveseat if she twitched again.

There was another spasm, and her fist twisted hard in Sam's hair until he broke contact. "Stop stop stop," she begged, on a desperate whisper, "gimme a minute." Sam's smile was poorly suppressed, but he obeyed, settling a little lower on his knees. 

Dean could see Sam was still stuck in his jeans, too, erection bending them visibly, and his chest was rising and falling with some faint sign of the effort he'd put in. His lips were flushed and just a little swollen, and his chin was glossy with Lucy's wetness. 

Dean barely stopped himself from a reflexive, "Lookin' good, Sam," even though he told himself it would only have been to tease Sam about the wildness of his hair and not to comment on the satisfied, mid-fuck look he had. He _did_ look good, though. Dean decided that thought didn't need examining, either.

"How you doin'?" he asked Lucy, instead, wrapping his arm warmly across her shoulders. She made a sound that she may have thought constituted speech, but when Dean prompted her with a "huh?" she shook her head with a drunken looseness.

"Mn," she said (sort of). "Good," she managed, after that, loosening her hands in Sam and Dean's hair, rubbing her fingertips along their scalps, maybe to soothe the stinging from her hair pulling. "'M'good." 

She started to sag in Dean's arms, though, and he cursed, struggling to let her down and off gently, but she stopped her own descent when she got to her hands and knees, pressing her hips back into his to keep him from withdrawing. She squeezed him hard, then, with intent, and hunkered down a little further, onto her elbows.

"Sam," she slurred, and awkwardly waved him up towards her. Sam's eyes were huge, intense, but he went, slowly, bringing his face up close to hers. 

Dean made a sound that was something like _ohholyshit_ when Lucy pulled Sam in for a messy, filthy kiss, licking the traces of herself from his face hungrily. There was a centerless groan, and Dean wasn't sure whom it came from; maybe all of them.

"Jesus, you are a dirty girl," Dean said, impressed. He was suddenly filled with visions of adding this dumb town and this strange woman to their list of yearly pilgrimages, like Vegas week but with kinkier sex and less lost money. It wasn't like there'd be any less booze or separation from the "real" world. And anyway, any excuse to have a non-work bonding field-trip with his brother was worth considering. Maybe once all the blood wasn't draining from his brain straight into his dick he'd think better of a Devil's threesome as a bonding trip; maybe there'd be some flood of regret and horrified sanity. But maybe not.

Dean was not softening and his thighs were not getting any happier with the arrangement, so he cleared his throat and shifted just a little to ease the strain, maybe draw the attention back to where he thought it ought to be. "Any chance we could uh…?"

Lucy let the kiss break and nodded, but she got one hand on Sam's cheek and was holding his serious gaze.

"I swear to God," she murmured to Sam, and it was rough as sandpaper, "if you kiss him, I will blow you 'til you see stars."

Dean's higher order functioning wanted to cut in, to protest that talking about it was one thing and doing it was entirely another, but Lucille took that moment to give a shuddering, drawing squeeze to his dick, and well, who was he to deny Sam a king-hell blowjob over something like that? And there wasn't much hotter than a girl taking it from both ends, so it's not like he wouldn't be getting something out of it, too.

Sam eventually managed to drag his eyes away from Lucille's, up to Dean's, and his face was unreadable, but Dean thought he must be looking for guidance, for Dean's permission or the shut-down or whatever it was he needed. Dean didn't know what that was. So (after scanning around the room for anything that might even possibly be a camera), he tried to keep his face just as neutral, and his voice even, and said, "Up to you," with as little inflection as he could.

Anyway, he'd do anything for Sam; didn't Sam know that by now?

Sam blinked a few times, slowly, looked like he was searching for a tell in Dean's face, but he shifted upright onto his knees again, shifting closer, and there was a cool trickling sensation down Dean's spine, too thin to be panic but maybe something in the ballpark. But then Lucille was gripping his dick, again—accidentally, he guessed, since she was shifting, twisting to be able to see the space between the brothers' faces—and Dean could see her panting, her eyes black with lust, slowly sucking her bottom lip in between her teeth. He might not get it, why she wanted to see this so bad, but there was no denying she wanted it, like water, like air.

Dean's pulse was hammering; he could feel it jumping under his ears. He allowed himself a very deliberate thrust into Lucille, to solidify his sense of place, of rightness, and she let out a slick, slow moan, but Sam was closing the distance between them, and Dean found he couldn't look anywhere but his brother's face, even with the girl writhing between them. In sheer, desperate self-preservation, he closed his eyes, so when lips finally met his, they could have been anyone's, soft and unsure and gentle. With no stubble to break the illusion, it could have been any girly virgin, with only the image of Sam's face seared on the back of his eyelids to remind him of what was happening. But he could pretend that wasn't there. Maybe. Dean gripped Lucille's hips—her wide, soft, definitely-not-Sam hips—and focused on the feeling of her, warm and tight around his dick, and thought, just maybe, that he could survive this after all.

"Oh, more," Lucy whispered, pleading, and there was an organic loosening between their mouths, not consciously directed (at least not by Dean). There was a tender brush of a tongue over his lower lip, a shy ingress, and Dean rolled his hips again for courage before meeting the tongue with his own.

All Dean could taste on this mouth was the liquor, the sweet and warm spice of it, mingling with Lucille's wetness into some delicious and wicked ambrosia. His breath left him in a soft huff, and he let himself tilt in, tilt open, to drink in the taste, and when the tongue against his got greedy, pushed into his mouth in a rush, he sucked it in almost easily. Lucy was moaning encouragement below them, soft enough to not quite distract, but bolstering in its need, and its femininity. Her hips were grinding back against his, too, and whatever his higher order thinking might have to say about it, later, his dick was learning quickly to associate this kiss with the thrilling pulse around it.

There was the shhhhh sound of a belt being unbuckled and slid open, the easing of a zipper, and the part of him still capable of conscious thought realized Lucy must be undoing Sam's jeans, getting ready to deliver her promised reward. Relief washed over him—surely, they could relax and get back to fucking, then—but hands that were way, way too big to be a girl's, rough with the callouses of hard labor, were suddenly on his face, tentatively cradling his jaw, even as their uncertainty was belied by the hunger of the kiss. 

If it were anyone else but his brother, Dean would almost have thought... 

She must have got his dick out, Dean thought fleetingly, that was all. And when Dean was pulled, forced to bend a little over her body as Sam shifted up onto the sofa with them, he was proved right by the wet and hungry sounds of Lucille's eager mouth. He relaxed a little; Sam was just turned on by the blowjob proximity. He couldn't figure out why it was they were still kissing if Lucille couldn't see, anymore, though.

It took a couple tries to break the kiss. The first failed because Sam's hands and Lucille's pussy both resisted Dean moving away, but when Dean jerked his head, Sam's hands fell away like they had been burned. The kiss evaporated, leaving only the wetness and the buzzing in his lips from the friction. Dean blinked his eyes open blearily, saw that Sam was sitting on the sofa, now, Lucille's face buried in his lap, and Sam's head bowed, obscuring his face almost entirely with his hair. His hands were starting to tangle into Lucille's mane, and the way Lucille was rocking up and down on Sam's— _Jesus!_ —substantial dick was making her slide back and forth on Dean's dick in the same rhythm, a closed system connecting them together with her body.

Dean needed—needed something, needed to obliterate the seeping cloud of doubt and unease trying to slip in, to take over his body through his skin. Luckily, there was not much that was straighter or manlier in Dean's mind than riding a girl on her knees, so he shook his head to clear the anxiety and took hold of her hips, gripping her cinched waist fiercely and with purpose. She moaned, muffled, on Sam's—on Sam, and for a moment war broke out, no one willing to cede control of the rhythm between them. There was straining tension, uncoordinated and counter-productive, but then something happened, like happened in the best hunts, and resistance bled away in an instant. Dean didn't have to look to realize that Sam had (metaphorically) stepped back, and was letting Dean lead, must even be watching Dean or feeling for him so he could step in when Dean fell back, drive forward when he retreated, Lucille mostly pinned in place between them. And just like that, they were all three a single entity, again, rolling inexorably towards some precipice of perfect oblivion and damnation.

Dean slid his fingers inside of the back of Lucille's choker, not needing to be asked; he was a quick learner. She let out a wild sound, muffled, when he did, and Sam sounded, too, in reaction (Dean guessed) to the vibration in her mouth. 

Lucille had her hands stuffed in between Sam's legs, one wrapped around the base of him and the other somewhere Dean couldn't see, lower, and though he couldn't tell exactly how she was working her mouth, it was loud and wet and messy, exactly the kind of filthy, graceless blowjob he loved best. He assumed Sam preferred it that way, too, and didn't know why. 

Sam finally stopped hiding his face down in the defensive posture curled around Lucy. Whether it was his favorite kind of blowjob or not, it was clear, at least, that this was working for him. Sam was bracing one shoulder against the back of the loveseat, but his chest was arching back in the air, the ropes of muscle in his neck working visibly, his mouth open in mostly silent reverie and his fingers tangling so hard in Lucy's hair Dean was certain it must be painful. They made eye contact by accident, and both looked away quickly, but Dean could still hear Sam panting over Lucy's generous groaning. 

Dean wondered if Lucy could sense, somehow, when he was slipping, brushing up too close against the scarier parts of the reality of the thing, because she started squeezing him with her muscles, again, on and off, holding him tight through a couple thrusts at a time, and it wasn't long before his brain blanked blissfully back out. In gratitude, he tugged against her choker, until it—well—choked her, and he would have sworn he could feel her getting wetter as he did, even through the condom, something in the way he could slide through with no resistance even when she gripped him so tight his eyes tried to cross. 

His rhythm began to break down as he got closer to the edge, something wild like running and fighting bloody searing through his veins. He gritted out a rough sound, gripping Lucille's hip desperately with one hand, and came, and he was sure for a moment that he was blind and deaf. There was blackness and floating and silence, and then something seized his arm, kept him from tipping right off the loveseat.

Dean's senses resolved slowly, and his balance a little slower still, and he was more than a little impressed that holding Dean up didn't stop Sam chasing his own orgasm and catching it, Lucille's head forced low under Sam's huge paw while he rode it out. Dean's hands had gone slack already, luckily, so at least he wasn't the one who might accidentally choke her to death, this time.

When Lucille started to struggle, and Sam didn't look quite able to unclench his grip on her hair or on Dean's arm, Dean managed to find his voice. "Hey, Sammy," he said, very carefully, while he wrapped one hand around Sam's wrist, close to Lucille's hair, forcibly drawing it back enough that Lucille could get her breath again. "Gonna' have to let go," he said, and it was the easy, no-sudden-movements tone he'd use for a vampire who was barely resisting going full fang, or someone fighting a possession. "You're okay," he tried, because Sam wasn't responding, wasn't quite with them, but after a long, tense moment, Sam seemed to believe it, his white knuckles unbending, fingers shaking a little while they fought to let go of Lucille's hair. 

Lucille disentangled slowly, and a little voice in Dean's head pointed out that Lucille had _definitely_ swallowed, even while she was strangling, because there was no trace of the slick gloss of cum between them, Sam's skin licked clean. Dean knew he couldn't go again, yet, but there was still a delicious twitch in his groin at the thought.

Realizing he was still inside of Lucille, Dean gingerly withdrew, pulling his pants up enough to not trip while he retreated to the bathroom to deal with the condom and clean up. The bent-tailed cat glared at him from Lucille's bed when he passed, but since it wasn't a vengeful spirit ready to strangle him to death, he figured tonight was definitely looking better than the night before. 

Dean took advantage of the privacy to stretch, and beat some of the threatening cramp out of his hamstring and hip. Still, if some stiff joints was the worst that came out of this, he was definitely going to propose return trips for coming years. He made a mental note to check in with Sam about whether he'd be on board for that, as soon as he could figure out a not-weird, not-touchy-feely, not-gay way to ask.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one with the talking. Don't worry, it won't last.

When Dean got back to the living room, he found himself the most dressed member of the party. Sometime while he'd been away, Sam and Lucille had finished stripping out of their things, and so Lucille looked softer, gentler, where she was coiled on the couch, sitting on one hip, and Sam was draped up against her while she fed him liquor from her glass. Between her hair and Sam's, most of the marks left on her skin by the corset were obscured, and Dean thought maybe that was why she'd chosen the position she had; it was strange to imagine her being self-conscious, considering what a wild child she'd proven to be, but there it was.

"Technically," Dean said, pointing loosely toward the iPod as Queen swelled back on in a crescendo of trippy synthesizer, "this one shouldn't be on your 'Sexy Seventies' list. _The Game_ came out in June of 1980."

Lucille looked impressed, and not in that fake, "look at that, it read a book" way Dean tended to get nailed with when he proved he wasn't just a pretty face. 

"I snuck a few on that don't quite fall in that decade," Lucille admitted. "But 'Sexy 1967 to 1980' didn't have the same ring to it. Most people wouldn't catch that," she added, looking at him appraisingly, while she ran her fingers through Sam's hair. Sam had his eyes closed, blissed out on petting. 

Dean suddenly wondered if that was why he kept his hair long.

"And I never remember exactly which year a song came out," Lucille said, a little chagrined. "I had to look them up when I made the lists."

"Dean's good with dates," Sam said easily, as though comments that praised some part of Dean's intellect was just something he did, ever. "Think he remembers every date of every important thing that's ever happened to either of us," Sam went on, "every trip, every case…"

"Guess I do," Dean allowed, warily, waiting for the required barbs, but they didn't seem to be forthcoming. It was true; dates seared onto Dean's brain, when they were important, but he hadn't realized that that was something that Sam, with his Stanford brain and his crazy IQ, would even think to notice. 

Dean found himself a little flustered. He crouched and unlaced his boots, to have something to look at that wasn't the two of them.

"Of course he also remembers the release dates of every arena rock and metal album," Sam said, peeking one eye open to sneak a look at Dean, "so he's not using his powers all for good."

"There it is," Dean said, "'knew it."

"What?" Sam was smiling at him full on, now. "You're not going to pretend you don't."

"No, I'm not," Dean said with as much dignity as he could muster while standing in his socks, talking to a man whose dick was hanging out. 

Sam's smile faded, and he shifted up onto an elbow to look at him. "I think it's kind of amazing, Dean," he said, suddenly serious, his brow knitting in concern. "You… know that I know you're smart, right?"

Dean snorted, faking a smile. "Right, says mister perfect-score-on-the-LSAT."

"It wasn't a perfect score," Sam said, as though the difference between 174 and 180 made any kind of impact on someone like Dean. "And it doesn't mean I think any less of you. Dean," he said again, and there was that sharp awareness in his eyes that he got when he was dissecting something for the truth, " _you_ know that you're smart, right?"

"Got street smarts," Dean said, trying to dismiss this conversation as a bad job. "S'all I need." Well; that and a beer. He badly needed a beer, now. "Beer?" he offered, as he went for the fridge.

They both made sounds of assent, but when he got back with three open bottles, Sam was sitting upright, apparently unwilling to let this go. "Dean…" he was saying, again, before Dean had even handed off the bottle.

"Leave it, Sam. I'm never going to be as smart as you, and I'm fine with that. World couldn't handle two like you." He sank down into the armchair Sam had been in earlier; it made a big improvement over the stiff upholstery of the loveseat.

"I'm just saying," Sam persisted, "you're still smart. Really smart. We're just… different. I know I tell you you're being an idiot—"

"A lot," Dean interjected.

"—All right, a lot," Sam concurred, "but that's just because it makes me crazy when you decide you're going to do something brave and stupid and not care if it gets you torn to pieces. And that has nothing to do with intelligence, it's just about your lack of interest in self-preservation."

Lucy made a curious little "hm" sound, and Dean and Sam both startled. Dean had somehow forgotten she was there, in the face of having to bear up under one of his brother's touchy-feely attacks. He was preparing another attempt at shutting down the conversation entirely when Sam rounded on Lucille.

"We're not even going to get into _your_ lack of self-preservation," he said, and it was clearly a warning.

Sam seemed taller when he was looming over someone so small. Or maybe Lucy seemed even smaller next to him. Whatever it was, Lucy shrank down a little more, sinking deeper onto her hip, and something about the posture made Dean think of some old black-and-white damsel in distress flick, like a villain (presumably Sam, in this metaphor) was about to swoop in and scoop her up. Though he'd probably have been wearing more clothes, in the film, unless they were already filming pornos, back then; Dean wasn't sure. Any minute now, Lucy would wind up tied to the railroad tracks or walking the plank or unconscious in Nosferatu's bed. The softness of her body, the long, messy cloud of curls; everything just fed into the image. All she needed was some vampy eyeliner and dramatic piano music, instead of Lou Reed exhorting them to take a walk on the wild side.

Dean was fascinated, in spite of himself. He leaned back to watch what would happen, and was a little surprised to realize that he wouldn't mind it much if it _did_ turn into a retro porno. Then again, he'd watch most any porn once.

Lucy's posture might be the perfect image of submission, but her face was coquettish, baiting. "If it weren't for my devil-may-care attitude toward my own well-being," she said, slyly, "we wouldn't have all had such a nice evening." Her fingers were drifting over the neck of the bottle she was holding, all tease.

"It's not over yet," Sam said, darkly, but there was a hint of a smile underneath it. Lucy's pale skin started to take a little color, faintly pink, and she bit her lip. Then, though it seemed an odd choice to Dean, Sam pulled a classic chick-at-the-bar move and took a long, suggestive pull from his beer, eyeing Lucy over the bottle.

"Well," she said, voice thin, "if I didn't wind up stabbed or beaten to death for suggesting these two big, strapping brothers make out for me, what else could I get away with?" 

Dean was impressed, in spite of himself. "You got something even kinkier up in that melon than—well, everything else we've already covered?"

"You have no idea," Sam muttered. "And you don't want to." He sounded so sincere that Dean almost believed him. Almost.

Lucille gave Sam a faint pout, at that. 

"Anyway," Sam said significantly to Lucille, "you've had your turn. The whole setup was your idea, and you got your kiss. I say—I say it's Dean's turn," he suggested, magnanimously, gesturing to Dean with his beer.

Dean froze, lip of the beer bottle to his mouth. "Naw, Sammy," he said, when he could make his mouth form words, "I'm good. You're the one who was patient and let us stay another day, you should name the game." He took a swig of his beer, then, to cover the sudden shyness. "Don't even know what you're into," he admitted, under his breath, feeling all at once a little ashamed of that, though it had always seemed so very, very important, before today, to never learn. Now, he couldn't quite remember why.

Sam seemed no more willing to assert a preference than Dean had, now just as interested in his beer as Dean was in his own.

Lucille's mouth flattened into a wry little smile. "Do we need little slips of paper to write down ideas anonymously? An a-la carte survey? Blindfolds?"

Something lurched alarmingly in Dean's midsection. "How—why blindfolds?" he asked, and wondered why his voice was tight.

"I meant," Lucille explained, "that I could put you both in blindfolds so you wouldn't see one another, and just run through the laundry list." There was something knowing in her eyes, though, now, something intrigued. "Then you could raise your hands if you liked something without having to worry about what the other one thought. And if we hit something where you both raised your hands, we'd know we'd found a winner."

"Isn't it easier to just get drunk and see what happens?" Dean asked, desperately. He couldn't seem to stop imagining the blindfold coming down over his eyes, though.

"Fine by me," Sam said, and there was a shade of apology in it. He mumbled something about the bathroom and, newly self-conscious, pulled back on his jeans and made for the hall.

Lucille looked unsurprised, and watched after him hawkishly, like she were waiting for some cue. It seemed to be the bathroom door latching, because as soon as Dean heard it, she rounded on him. "He won't be able to hear," she promised, a little pitch of feverish excitement in her voice. "Please…" she purred, and she was up, crossing quickly to him and climbing onto his lap, straddling his legs.

Well, that was nice. Trying to cover his surprise, he wrapped his arms loosely around her waist, careful to keep the cold beer bottle from bumping her skin. "Sure, whatcha' got in mind?"

"Oh, a hundred things," she said, dismissively, "but I want to know what _you_ want," and the heat and hunger in her voice made Dean almost believe it. Her fingers were sliding up his jaw, back into his hair, fervent. "What do you like to do?"

He laughed, a little uneasy. "I dunno, same stuff as everybody," he evaded, shrugging. "I like hot girls; I'm really not that complicated."

She was staring hard into his eyes, skeptical or curious, like if she just looked long enough she'd be able to read some secret from his mind. "Even if there'd be no judgment?" she asked, perceptively. "Even if you could have anything you wanted and nothing would go wrong?"

"Starting to sound a little like a demon there, Luce," he said, on a nervous chuckle, trying to play it for a joke.

Lucille tilted her head and looked a little confused. "Demons want to make dreams come true?" she asked, then after a moment, "Are they… is that… something you've seen?" Her eyes were wide, and Dean thought she might look a little too interested.

He gave a little noncommittal tilt of his head. "That's why we ask about the sulfur smell, whether eyes have gone all solid black—or red or white, actually, depending on the type. But trust me, Luce," he said, and he laid all the weight of his knowledge on it, "you want to stay the hell away from demons. They are bad news. And nothing they offer is going to be worth selling your soul into an eternity of torture."

She frowned at him, perplexed, like he'd said something very strange. But then she shook her head, slowly, like she was dislodging a dream. "It's—no, of course," she said, squeezing him reassuringly. "I don't want anything that badly, anyway," she said, and Dean thought she seemed sincere. Some of the tension that had crept up into his shoulders started to ease. 

It took Lucille a few moments to regroup, reeling back to where she'd started. "I mean strictly in the fantasy world." She brushed her thumbs tenderly over his temples, then, and his eyes closed reflexively. "There are so many sweet, dark things we hide away, and no reason to. Not here," she promised, kissing his eyelids softly, then his lips. "With all the things I want, all the things I do, there's nothing I could judge."

"I—highly doubt that," Dean said, because he couldn't imagine anyone not having a line. He opened his eyes, figuring he needed eye contact to make her understand. "But even if—just saying that's true, and _you_ really wouldn't care whatever it was, even if I made up some really heinous shit, I could still leave here tomorrow with no trouble if you changed your mind. Him, on the other hand," he said, jerking his head to indicate the absent Sam, "him I gotta live with. My luck, I'd say something I thought was totally kosher and all of a sudden he'd freak out and never come back."

There was a look of serious consideration, for that. Lucille's eyes were darting back and forth between his, digging for—something.

"So tell _me,_ " she said, finally. "Not him. Your brother has his own wants—I've seen some of them, and the worst I could do was fail to make them happen."

"Seem to have heard something about an axe," Dean interrupted, one eyebrows raised in accusation. He wanted to come back around to whatever Sam had told her, but first things first.

"Oh," Lucille scoffed then, sourly, "that had nothing to do with his sexual fantasies. He made some crack about me sacrificing my chickens for—I can't even remember what, I got so mad. So," she said, like she was making a reasonable concession, "if your deepest, darkest wish is to gut one of my chickens, then fine; that fantasy is one you shouldn't tell me. Short of that," she insisted, "I promise you that you have nothing to fear from my axe."

"You're…" Dean swallowed. "You're not going to come after me for liking bacon, are you?" It felt like an irrational thing, but he was suddenly very glad he had the protective cover of his jeans between them.

"No," she said, primly. "I wouldn't even come after you if you got excited by wrapping yourself head to toe in cuts of meat. I just wouldn't help you make that particular dream a reality." 

Dean tried very, very hard not to picture that, and his look of disgust must have been pretty obvious, because Lucille's serious composure cracked into a wry smile.

"That's the worst you have to fear from me," she persisted, "my saying, 'No, I can't do anything about that.' That's all."

There was something so kind in her tone, so gentle, that Dean started to believe it.

"Well," he said, after a moment, "I guess… I mean, I don't figure we can do anything about it tonight,, but two girls is hot. Really hot," he amended, and she nodded.

"To watch or to be with? I don't have anyone on call, at the moment," she clarified, apologetic, before his hopes could get up too high, "but if you ever get back to my corner of the world, I might be able to work something out, with a little time to plan."

And Dean's pants responded to that eagerly enough that he didn't actually need to say out loud what he thought about that prospect.

"Both," he said, anyway, for clarity's sake. "Either. Both super hot."

Lucille grinned, and the way she nipped her bottom lip made him think she might like the idea more than a little, herself. Or maybe she just liked listening.

Light dawned. 

"You like to hear what people like," he said, as though he'd caught her at something. "That's one of your things." 

"Well, of course," she said, though her face got a little pinker, "but I want to know for you, too. Hearing your fantasies is fun, but acting one of them out would be even better."

"I like doing whatever makes the person I'm with happy," Dean said, a little helplessly, "I swear, I'm not hard to get to have a good time."

Her fingertips were trailing down the back of his neck, now, her body sinking in closer to his. "Is that why you held me down?" she asked, softly. "And tied my corset up so tight?"

Dean tensed, and searched her face for any hint of accusation, but she looked liquid, warm and open. "Yeah," he said, cautiously, still feeling like he was on uneven ground, "seemed pretty obvious that was what you liked."

"Did you like it?" she asked, bumping her forehead against his, lips hovering near his mouth.

"Sure," he said. "Some of it I just liked seeing you like," he admitted, because she seemed to expect him to elaborate, "but, uh, tying your corset was, uh…" He faltered, because it felt too weird to admit; who liked tying corsets? "Guess that was pretty awesome."

She rewarded him—it felt like she was rewarding him, anyway—with a kiss, hot and filthy. "You can tighten my corset any time," she promised, fervently.

"The stockings were kinda' hot, too," Dean ventured, experimentally; would she kiss him like that again if he kept going? Was it really getting her ramped up just to hear him talk?

"Mmhmm," she agreed, encouragingly, and she did kiss him again, leaning her torso into his. "Do you think it's the fishnets specifically, or costumes in general…?" she prompted, and Dean leaned in to kiss her neck—gentler than before, because the marks he and Sam had left on her there earlier looked angry and purple.

"Fishnets," he said, against her skin, trying not to think too hard about it. "But costumes are awesome." She writhed against him, so he bowed to her breasts, mouthing. He could talk—maybe—if he could have access to breasts while it was happening. 

"Like—like the saloon girl outfit?" she panted, knowingly.

"Yeah," he admitted, stifling a smile on her. "Saloon girls, hot nurses, geishas, 'ye old time-y wenches'…" He paused to suck one of her nipples into his mouth, and closed his eyes to savor the little moan it got him. "If there's… pretty much, if there's a slutty Halloween costume for it, I'll dig it," he said, then switched breasts.

"Ah," she sighed, and it wasn't clear if it was an "ah" of understanding or of enjoyment. Her fingers were running hot over his scalp, though, so he took it she was happy, either way.

Dean lifted his head to kiss her, again, and she opened to him, ground her hips close.

"I actually…" He felt a little delirious, goaded on by the effect he was having on her. He went for broke, whispered conspiratorially against her ear, "I kinda' like… wearing stuff, too." It was ineloquent, but it was hard enough getting it out at all.

"Like what?" she whispered back, encouragingly. "God, you'd be a gorgeous greaser," she murmured, nibbling his ear.

 _Hell, yeah,_ he agreed, privately. "Whatever," he said out loud, "just, uh, just did the whole LARP thing recently, went all Braveheart on some nerds."

Lucille made an appreciative little growl. "Get you in a leather jerkin," she said, and it sounded like dirty words on her tongue, "tight breeches, knee-high boots…"

"Swashbuckler?" he asked, picturing it.

"Swashbuckler," she agreed, "or rugged farmboy, highwayman, knight errant…"

He could see that. Swinging in to rescue a damsel from distress, courting a duchess right out from under her jealous duke, robbing the hot noblewoman who'd ransom her virtue to keep her pearls… 

"Looked like my brother was ready to tie you to the railroad tracks earlier," he remembered, aloud. "I was—" 

What he planned on saying was something about how it could have been fun to play that out; Sam could keep pretending to be a tough guy and menace Lucille, Lucille would get to get tied up, Dean could swoop in to the rescue and make it with the grateful damsel. Win-win-win.

What came out was: "I was totally ready to just watch that happen."

Before he could be properly horrified and backpedal, Lucille tried to swallow him whole, starting at the mouth. He guessed that meant that had gone over well.

When she came up for air, she was panting, and her hands were pushing in between them to work at Dean's fly. He wished he could see where to set his beer down; he reached out with it, tried to feel for a table, while he let his other hand roam her bare skin.

"Do you want to?" she asked, still out of breath, when she got the button open. "Would you like to watch me with him?"

"Sure," Dean said, dazed, "if that's what you—"

"No, no," she interrupted, shaking her head, "not to make me happy. Do _you_ want to watch?" she whispered, insistently, pulling down his zipper. "You can do whatever you want," she soothed, kissing his forehead, his cheek, his jaw. "You can watch, you can _be_ watched." She reached his mouth and kissed him deeply, briefly. "I could make you a king, worshipped, or a slave at my feet. Villain or hero or conqueror or conquered. Anything," she said, a world of promise on her tongue. 

Dean closed his eyes, trying to actually sort it out through the rattling in his brain. He took a deep breath, tipped his head a little to the side, finally said, "No."

"No," Lucille repeated, roving her hands up his chest. "Okay. No to which?"

"No to—to watching you guys," Dean said, opening his eyes, but unable to meet hers. There was some awful weight to it, to deciding, to risking disappointing her, but there was a tiny exhilaration, too, whether from the rebellion or the freedom or the promise that honesty got her hot rather than disappointed. "I think—look, it sounds good," he ventured, letting his eyes flick briefly to her face and away again. "And I love watching porn, I'd totally do it, but I felt—I've felt weird any time you and Sammy had something going on without me, every time something has come up where one of you knows something about the other that I don't." He risked looking at her for longer, then, but there was no fallout; she was just nodding, eyes clear and no less eager than before, that he could tell. 

"That's fine," she said, firmly, "you don't have to be on the outside. You can even be in the middle, if you want," she offered, voice rough and wanting, though he couldn't believe Sam would agree to that.

"Doubtful," he said, and gave up on trying to get rid of the bottle, opting instead to bring it between them. He drank, and felt a little safer with the bottle for a shield.

"Why?" she asked, earnestly. "If you wanted it, why couldn't he?"

"I don't," he said, automatically, but the odd feeling from earlier was nagging him, those moments where he wanted so badly to not be the odd man out, to not be divided from either of them. "Anyway, didn't you just get done telling me that one person wanting something didn't mean the other one necessarily did?"

"Yes," Lucy admitted, and there was a hint of defeat in her tone. She didn't have a cure-all to cover that one.

"You were ready and willing to go along," she pointed out, but it was clear she saw the flaws in that argument as well as Dean did.

"You never went along with something that turned out to not be the best idea?" he asked, anyway, to make the point.

"Kind of my forte," she replied, wry. "But," she added, firmly, "I regret nothing. _Je ne regrette rien,_ " she repeated, poking him lightly in the chest, right over his tattoo.

"You will," Dean said, knowingly, "eventually. You'll go along with the wrong thing and then someone'll get hurt or worse, and you'll regret plenty."

"But not whatever I'd have missed if I'd said no," she said, simply. 

Dean shifted under her uncomfortably, at that. He finished his beer in a long swig.

"I have one life," she went on, though she was climbing carefully off of his lap to go retrieve her own beer, "and I will crack the bones and suck the marrow."

"And that's really hot," Dean said, huffing a laugh, "don't get me wrong. Just can't expect the rest of us to risk everything for it."

Lucy sat down on the floor opposite him, leaning her back up against the loveseat while she took a draw off the bottle. "What about in that fantasy world, where there are no consequences?"

Dean shrugged. "Who knows? Bizarro world, might try anything once--hell, even getting in between the two of you," he allowed. "But in the real world, nothing's worth risking losing him."

Lucille gave him a look that was all soft edges. "Believe me, the _last_ thing I'd want to do is separate brothers." 

"Yeah, I caught that," Dean said, a little wryly, pushing up to go fetch another beer. "Speaking of my brother, where the hell did he get to, anyway?"

"I'm right here," Sam said, from alarmingly close behind him, and Dean almost— _almost_ —smashed his face in with the empty bottle, stopped the attack reflex with not a moment to spare.

"Christ, Sammy, scared the shit out of me." Dean gripped the bottle tight and took a slow breath to steady himself. "How long you been there?" he asked, and tried to sound like it didn't matter, whatever the answer was.

"Not long," Sam said, a mask of nonchalance. 

"Don't know how you can be so quiet when you're the size of a damn house," Dean muttered, flustered. "Put a bell on you."

"Right," Sam said, but he was smiling. "'Cause I'm the only one who's done any eavesdropping today."

Dean hid his face in the fridge rather than risk showing any sign of guilt.

"Look," Sam said, slowly, when Dean had emerged with the next three beers, "let's just… think of this like Vegas. 'What happens in Columbia,'" he began the phrase, and didn't need to finish it.

"Yeah, sure," Dean said, without really meaning it, but he did remember his earlier wish to add this to their yearly rotation.

"Dean," Sam persisted, "I'm serious. Look, would you—can you honestly tell me there's anything I could fantasize about that would make you give up on me?"

"Nothing," Dean said, automatically. Though if the fantasy involved leaving and never coming back, Dean knew full well he'd never get over it.

Sam took a beer from him and tried very hard to make eye contact. "So why would you think I'd feel any differently about you?"

"Because you've always had one foot out the door," Dean said, and bit the inside of his cheek to shut himself up. He hadn't meant to say that out loud, either. He gave a half a second's thought to truth spells, but knew there was one in his hand, cold and sweating with condensation. He drank heavily from it, anyway.

Sam sighed. "Dude, I'm not going anywhere. Definitely not over something like this. If you want to—I don't know, put on a French maid outfit and stick a feather duster up your ass, I'm not going to freak out." 

Dean choked on his beer and doubled over hacking, while Sam slapped him on the back.

"Sorry, sorry," Sam said, but the bastard sounded like he was covering a laugh. "I'm just trying to make a point. If you need to beat the shit out of me to punish me for leaving, or—or you want to put me on a leash so you know I'm not going anywhere, that's fine." Sam's hand had settled into a grip on his shoulder, now, firm and strong. "I would do anything—literally anything, for you."

The warm feeling in his chest was uncomfortable, and while part of him wanted to hug Sam, just grab him and not let him go, he couldn't help the self-defense reflex, the urge to joke to deflect and protect himself. "Yeah, you say that now, but what if it was _you_ in the maid outfit with the feather duster?"

"Then," Sam said, face very serious, "I'd shake my ass and ask what you wanted dusted."

 

***

"So, Sammy, by my count you have twice— _twice,_ today—offered to let someone just beat the crap out of you." They had all settled in with new beers, damiana chasers, and a new playlist—Lucy had snuck on something more to Sam's taste, heavier with '90's alt and grunge, and a woman was promising she'd burn for you, feel pain for you… "Sounds a little to me like you're looking to get spanked," Dean observed. He was still in his jeans, but on the loveseat, this time, Lucy naked and tucked under one of his arms. She seemed to like that he'd said that, if the way she nestled up was any indication.

Sam startled, though, and looked honestly confused. "No. I guess I just figured you'd both have a good reason to want to," he said, shrugging. "I mean, you both have scars because of me. Actual, physical scars."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Admit it, you just want to be the gimp."

Embarrassment was twisting Sam's face. "Uh, seriously, no. And anyway, you're the one who starts bar fights when you're feeling guilty about something; if anyone here is looking to 'get spanked,' I think it's you."

Lucille raised one hand. "I think _I'm_ the one who likes to get spanked, actually."

"Fair enough," Sam said. "But Dean, I've watched you do it a million times—you get messed up and all of a sudden you go looking for bloodshed."

"And you don't?" Dean asked, disbelieving.

"No," Sam said, earnestly. "I mean, yes, but—not my own. You saw what I turned into every time I lost it: with Ruby, with the Trickster, when I didn't have—while I was with the Campbells," he evaded, carefully. "My dark side is way more sadist than masochist."

There were parts of that statement that didn't track, and Dean opened his mouth to pursue them, but Lucille said, "I'll say," with such dark relish he was blown completely off course. He looked between her, where she was so close she was almost in his lap, and Sam, across from them in the armchair, unsure where to start.

Lucille apologized quietly into her tumbler.

Dean tried to track back. "Okay, so. First of all, stuff with the Campbells doesn't count. You were 'not yourself,'" Dean said, as significantly as he could. "That goes for whatever happened with you and Lucy, too." And while he said it to convince Sam, he found he wanted badly to hang onto it, himself. "Second—I don't know what the hell you're talking about, with the rest of that."

"Yes, you do," Sam insisted. "When I died, you sold your soul to bring me back. Right away." Dean tried to shut him up with a stern look and a warning nod toward Lucy, but Sam ignored him. "But when you died, I killed and tortured anything that got in my way, trying to get you back. And then I started treating Ruby like a friggin' chew toy. Those are fundamentally different approaches to the same problem. I may not be proud of how I behaved, but it's still something that's in me."

"Ix-nay on the oul-say elling-say," Dean muttered, irritably. Lucy was pretending poorly that she wasn't listening, looking into her glass rather than up at either of them, but her eyes were very wide.

Sam shrugged, gave him a sorry-but-not-all-that-sorry look. "I kinda think the pretending-monsters-don't-exist ship has sailed, here, Dean."

Dean shifted Lucy until he could look her sternly in the eye. "You just remember what I said about selling your soul, Luce," he said, batting cleanup. "Never worth it, and you _almost_ never come back from it."

He gave Sam a look that clearly said, 'Happy, now?' and Sam looked alarmed.

"Was she—were you talking about—?"

"No!" Lucille denied, raising a hand defensively. "I have no intention of selling my soul!"

It was Sam's turn to look worriedly between the two of them, this time. Dean sighed.

"She just—she was talking like a crossroads demon," he explained, "all 'what can I do to make your dreams come true,' and when I said so, she looked a little too… into it. So I made a point of emphasizing just _how bad_ an idea it would be, and was trying to avoid mentioning our personal experiences, since they're… atypical. So thank you for spoiling that," he added, for a petty dig.

Sam gave him a look. "And I'm sure I was just supposed to intuit that that conversation had happened."

"Yes," Dean said, behind a façade of dignity. "You were. Anyway, I thought you were listening in."

Sam rubbed his face tiredly with one hand. "I swear, I didn't hear much."

"Uh-huh."

"Look," Sam tried, "you were worried I'd freak out if I heard something, so wouldn't it actually be _good_ if I had, since I'm not freaked out?"

Dean tried to follow that logic, but gave up. "Still rude, Sam," he insisted, but Sam just rolled his eyes again.

"Whatever. So you like porn and outfits, and doing whatever it takes to make someone happy. Sometimes, I like getting… a little rough, or feeling like I'm the one in control. If," he amended, "it's okay with the other person." Sam snuck a look at Lucy then, his eight-thousandth silent apology.

"Nothing wrong with that either," Dean said, "now can we please just stop talking and get back to doing?"

Lucy had that look of fake innocence that almost certainly presaged her proposing something fucked up. At this point, Dean was ready to go with just about anything if it would get the ball rolling again, so he prompted, "You got any ideas you want to share with the class?"

She looked steadfastly into her glass, rather than up at him. "I still think you might enjoy being the one in the middle." She tipped the glass up and finished it, then, leaning to set it down on the table. 

"Pretty sure there's not a way to do that that doesn't involve me taking a dick, which, not my thing," Dean said, slugging down his own glass to numb the weird slippery feeling in his stomach.

"What, not even to make me happy?" Lucille asked, very low, and winked at him. She took his glass away, but he only complained a little, because she climbed back onto his lap.

"Pretty sure I could come up with a way around that," she murmured, arching up close until all he could see if he looked down was round, white breasts. 

"She's a very creative thinker," Sam agreed, though Dean couldn't see him around Lucille's wild mane. Probably for the best, considering the topic of conversation. 

"By definition, it would still involve being touched by another male," Lucy reminded him, "so if that's likely to propel you into a bout of violent homosexual panic, I have plenty of other good ideas."

"Like what?" he asked, hopeful for a slightly less terrifying option, if there was one available. 

"Well…" she began, then leaned to brush her lips against his ear and murmur privately, "you seemed to enjoy it when your brother told you what to do with my corset. And we know Sam likes pushing us around," she added, her hips beginning to move in a slow pendulum against him.

"Uh-huh," Dean said, warmth flushing his skin. "And did, uh, you like that, too?"

She groaned, softly, and it was a more than eloquent answer.

"Could do that, then," Dean allowed, a little nervously. He was trying to figure out how to put it into words so it wouldn't come out creepy.

"Means you'd be the metaphorical center, too," she whispered, then kissed his ear and took the responsibility for getting it going out of his hands. She slipped back off of Dean's lap and stood, turning to face Sam, laying her hands on her hips in what almost managed to be a forceful pose, in spite of her nudity and stature.

"Executive decision," she reported. "You're in charge."

"Me?" Sam asked, and there was tension in his voice, though from where he was seated Dean still couldn't really see him, with Lucille standing between them.

"Yes, you," she replied, firmly. "You're going to tell Dean what to do to me. You just said you liked being in control, and Dean likes making you happy. And I," she said, more delicately, "enjoy being at the whims of others."

"Worked out pretty good with the corset," Dean ventured, leaning over just enough to shoot Sam a searching, significant look.

For one awful moment, Dean read Sam's posture as preparing for flight. Sam's whole body was rigid, hands gripping the arms of the chair hard enough to visibly dent the upholstery, and his face was frozen, wide-eyed. But then he reached for his beer, finished it in one long, draining gulp, and held out the empty bottle to Lucille. "Okay," he said, gamely, when she took it and set it on the table. "Parameters? Am I limited to telling Dean what to do to you, or can I tell you what to do to him, too?"

When Lucille deferred to Dean for an answer, he opened his mouth, but didn't know what to say. "I—dealer's choice," he said, finally.

Sam nodded, and the wheels were turning fast in that big head of his. "And do I stay on the outside, or am I allowed to tell you to to involve me?" He was glancing between Lucille and Dean, then.

"Is it weird you're asking _us_ how you're supposed to push us around?" Dean asked, genuinely intrigued.

Lucille shrugged. "It's very polite, actually."

"Well, whatever. Up to you," Dean said, "worst we can do is say no, right?"

"If you do," Sam said urgently, "I will take you at your word. No questions asked, no judgment, okay?"

Dean still couldn't quite trust that kind of assurance, but the more Sam and Lucy repeated it, the closer he got to believing them, at least for the night. It made some soft, stupid part of him feel just a little safer. "Yeah, sure," he said, as casually as he could. "Okay."

Lucille leaned closer to Dean and murmured, "You might want to give him the same assurance."

Dean frowned, not understanding, at first. "But I'm not telling him to do anything," he objected under his breath.

"That you won't judge him for what he asks for," she clarified. "Or if you think you would, tell him up front what he can't ask for."

"Man, you people are complicated," Dean said, shaking his head. "Fine. Sammy," he said clearer, "ask whatever you want. I solemnly swear not to freak out."

Sam gave him a look of disbelief potent enough that Dean rolled his eyes. "Fine. Don't tell me to, I don't know, lick your toes or mess with your dick. Don't tell me to fuck off and leave—that would freak me out. Happy?"

"Yes," Sam said. "Lucille?"

"You already know," she said, simply.

"Leave the animals out of it," Sam supplied, and Lucille nodded. "Trust me, that's not something I'm going to forget."

"And condoms if it's going anywhere below the belt," she said, and there was a sternness there that surprised Dean. What grown man even needed to be told that?

"Of course," Sam said, but Dean thought he looked a little embarrassed. He made a mental note to start hiding condoms in Sam's wallet (and duffle bag, and room, and pockets…). After all the comments about catching something off of saloon girls, yesterday, if Sam was the one with a spotty record, Dean was _not_ going to let him live it down.

"Dean," Lucille said, interrupting the thought, "are you clean?" 

"Yes, ma'am," Dean said, relatively proud of the fact. He didn't voice, "Last time I checked," but unlike _some_ people, apparently, he was pretty reliable with a rubber.

"Good. Then you don't need them if you're in my mouth." 

He remembered how Sam had looked when she'd got done with her tongue, and anticipation threatened to knock him down. 

"And otherwise, just don't send me to the hospital or the dentist. Anything else, if he tells you to do it, you can do it."

Dean wasn't sure whether to be offended that she'd think he'd hurt her that bad, worried (again) about what her prior experience with Sam had looked like, or scared that he was getting way out of his depth here. "Right," he said, instead, choosing to try to blot out all of those feelings. "One-hundred percent clear. Now, seriously, can we get on with it?"


	7. Chapter 7

Lucille looked embarrassed, mouthed, "Bathroom," then ran off to the back of the house. Dean hung his head into his hands. "Swear to God…"

"You know, sometimes it _is_ better to talk rather than just walk headlong into a psychiatric emergency," Sam said, drily.

"Yeah, yeah," Dean said, dismissively. He got up, then, deciding that if he had to wait any longer he'd at least look at the photos again, maybe start another playlist on the iPod. He scanned the shelves for anything eldritch, while he was at it. Didn't pay to get sloppy, no matter how good the sex was.

"Whole shelf of poetry," he said aloud, boggling, when he set the iPod back on its dock. "Whole shelf of art books… Oh, and some dust you missed," he teased, helpless to resist. "And—oh, and nude photography," he added, pleased, if completely unsurprised. He crouched to peruse those more carefully.

He was just tucking into a collection of artsy nudes of girls covered in tattoos and piercings when Lucille came dashing back out of the hallway, with a wicker basket full of miscellanea. He didn't get a good look, but he thought he saw leather and silk. And lots of little blue foil packets.

"Good," Sam said, and all at once his voice had sunk into that smooth, dark place it went when he was interrogating someone. The hairs stood up on the back of Dean's neck automatically, and he abandoned the book in an instant, walking cautiously closer to Sam. It must just be the nearness of sex, after what felt like such a long and drawn out negotiation, but his jeans were very suddenly too tight; he wished he'd never bothered to zip them back up.

Sam spent a few moments looking into the basket, then his posture went like his voice had, loosening into something easy and predatory. 

"Dean," he said, lazily, "she's about to run. Stop her."

Lucille caught on faster than Dean, but Dean had the better reflexes, and before she'd dashed more than a stride past him, he had a fistful of her loose hair, pulling her up short.

"Shit, sorry," he said, when she yelped and stumbled back towards him, but she gave his arm a bracing squeeze and mouthed that she was fine. She made a show of trying to get her hair free, then, so he took a breath to settle his nerves and crowded her against the wall until he could pin both of her arms. When he had her caught, he frog-marched her back out in front of Sam, and, with a flash of inspiration, pushed her roughly down to her knees. 

Sam flashed him a short smile for that, and Dean felt a deep satisfaction wash over him, through him. Something felt very, very right.

Lucille fell suitably dramatically, playing the perfect damsel again, just as, from the small speakers, Sammy Davis, Jr. was exhorting them to hit the floor and _crawl to Daddy._

"Good," Sam said, again, rummaging in the basket. He tossed a couple of items at Dean, who caught them by reflex before he'd even identified them. They turned out to be cuffs—not the unforgiving metal police issue, and not the cutesy furry ones from the novelty stores at the mall, but the happy medium—broad black leather straps with cold silver rings and buckles. Dean didn't need to be told what to do, but Sam told him anyway, because that was the game. He almost made, "Cuff her," sound convincingly bored, but Dean had learned long ago to listen for threads of hidden strain in his brother's voice, and there was an electric current below the surface, now, surging and dangerous, and Dean's pulse sped up in complement.

He felt a little like the hired gun, the unthinking machine of violence at the right hand of the villainous mastermind, which meant that in an action movie the hero would be putting a bullet in him, any minute now. But this wasn't an action movie. This was Purgatory, he thought; this was porn; the heroes here were whoever you wanted them to be, whoever came out on top. He was a weapon and he didn't have to think, here, now, because Sam would think for him, and Sam would tell him to do whatever Sam needed, and that meant Sam would be happy—and if Sam was happy, Sam would stay, and they would still be that perfect organism of single-minded action, two bodies in one uncleavable whole.

Dean tried not to prod at that thought pattern much.

Lucille didn't fight him while he worked, really, just leaned away, but she was panting under the curtain of her hair in a way that made him pretty sure she was enjoying this. A lot. And open and primed as he was to receive, it slid into Dean and became a fast infection, transmissible kink, and working the buckles became rewarding for its own sake. As soon as he had her latched in, he fiddled with the carabiner that was dangling from the ring at her left wrist until he could latch it through the one at her right, clipping them together behind her back; the professional in him balked at how easy this setup would be to get out of if the captive had even basic fine motor control, but that gave him a little peace of mind, too, the implied promise that she was exactly where she wanted to be. It soothed the part of his brain that had been holding in reserve, resisting the animal mindlessness, and when it was gone, there was nothing to stop the hot thing spreading through his shoulders and down his back. His hands slid trembling up and down her lower arms, unbidden, absorbing sensation. He looked owl-eyed up at Sam, then, watchful and waiting for the next instruction.

Sam's face broke in some kind of ecstasy at that, and Dean was blissfully unbothered to see it, this time. It nourished some soft thing inside, and he'd just have to wait and worry about the Freudian implications of that later (or not even then, if he could avoid it). For now, it just left him content deep down, eager as a dog to please again.

"Stand her up," Sam said, hoarsely, when he'd gathered himself back together, and Dean got up, pulling her easily along after. He supposed she could do it herself, but that wouldn't be as fun for any of them. 

There was another brief little look of—gratitude? satisfaction?—from Sam, and Dean tightened his grip on Lucille's arm, hungry. "I think she should be pretty for us," Sam said, then, his voice back under control. He rustled another band of leather out of the basket, this one longer than the others, and handed rather than tossed it to Dean, whose fingers wrapped around it curiously. It was smooth, but still a little stiff, like it didn't get enough use, and Dean let go of Lucille without thinking to stretch it between both hands, kneading and twisting and bending and rolling to soften it, like he would when he was preparing to stitch down new leather in the Impala after she'd taken damage. Dean realized he'd lost a couple of minutes that way when Sam cleared his throat, and tamped down his embarrassment. 

Dean took a breath that surprised him in its unsteadiness, walking around the front of Lucy to tip her chin up. He gamely tried to find his badass interrogator face, but he knew it wasn't quite right, could feel it sitting just a little false and uneasy; still, Lucille's body tightened and curved, and when he pressed forward with the leather, she bowed her head over it, opening up the back of her neck for him, and there was an impossible tenderness and vulnerability there. It was awkward buckling it without getting her hair caught inside, and in spite of his better efforts some of it still wound up trapped, but once the collar was latched, he carefully got his fingers between her hair and her skin to gather it out, letting it fall loose down around her face and shoulders. She stayed bowed that way, small and delicate, and for one mad moment Dean wanted her to flee, to run from him just so he could catch her again, trap her beneath his body to feel immense and powerful. He saw that, without realizing it, he'd clasped her shoulders in his hands—which looked huge and brown and hard-worn, by comparison--and he had to consciously prise them away, clenching them hard into fists at his side so he could feel the muscles in his arms work against one another in barely restrained violence. 

Lucille looked up at him, then, for just a moment, and he thought his badass face must have naturally resolved itself. Her eyes had gone wide and glassy, and she drew in on herself as much as she could with her arms pulled back behind her, fear or thrill running through her in a subtle trembling. He wanted so badly to bite her, then, but Sam hadn't told him to. Sam was order and rule of law, now; Dean dragged himself purposefully back from the prey in front of him and turned back to Sam.

Sam's eyes did something strange, when Dean met them, a kind of twitching double blink, like he'd stopped them from fluttering closed but not quite soon enough. They were staring at one another for a long, pregnant moment, but Sam broke it, tightening his mouth down into a tense little purse and looking around the room for something.

"What do you think, Dean," he began, solicitous in a way that was tinged with something heavy, something dangerous; "should we put her back in the garter belt and fishnets?"

"Yeah, Sam," Dean said, unsure if it was more because he wanted that for himself or because it was what he thought Sam wanted to hear. His voice had got on board with interrogation mode, thankfully; it sounded hard and deep and raw, and it fed back into the feeling of animalness, inside him, of being base and lesser and perfect for it, a soldier or a guard dog or a blade honed to perfection.

Following Sam's eyes to where they had landed, over behind the coffee table, Dean spotted Lucy's discarded clothes and went to gather the necessaries: the garter belt, the fishnets, and, after a second's hesitation, the corset. He thought about the boots, too, but he and Sam were barefoot, so he wrote them off as asking for unnecessary heartache. If Sam said different, he could always go back. For now, he dropped the pile unceremoniously by Lucy's feet and looked to Sam for the go-ahead. Sam nodded, and it looked like an indulgence. Dean felt indulged.

It took an embarrassing amount of fiddling with the delicate items to work out what order this would have to happen in. Eventually, he settled on the garter belt as the starter, an improbably serious piece of equipment sewn in stiff black sateen with tiny embroidered patterns he was somehow certain Lucille had done by hand. The image of her curled up in the armchair under lamplight, wearing nothing but lingerie while she sewed delicate little stitches that no one would see until moments like these, was oddly titillating. 

It fought him every step, turning out to be inside out or upside-down or backwards at every opportunity, and it was awkward getting between Lucille's bound hands and where he'd have to latch the hook and eye clasps together, but it was worth it for the way she twitched every time his fingers accidentally brushed her skin, and for the wicked look of the shiny, ruched straps dangling down over the curve of her bottom. Deliberately, Dean gathered one up in his hand so his knuckles curled against her flesh, let them drag against her as he let the strap slip through his fingers. Lucille shivered hard, then, and without his bidding his hand was back on her flank, curling hard into the satisfying resistance. 

"Dean," Sam said softly, but whether in warning or just to bring him back, Dean couldn't tell. He dropped his hand like Lucille's body was burning, regardless, and took a short step back for good measure.

Sam looked momentarily concerned or puzzled, then forced his face smooth. "Stockings. If you can," he added, a little quieter, admission clear in his voice that he wasn't sure how feasible it would be. There was a tacit promise there'd be no disappointment if Dean failed, but Dean fully intended to make it work, one way or another.

Dean had seen enough rushed mornings-after with girls who were going to have to run to work in the same clothes they'd left in the night before that he had a pretty good bead on the mechanics of putting back on discarded stockings, knew at least enough to bunch them down to the toe before trying to pull them on. Just in case, he asked very quietly if this pair were particularly special to Lucille, and she laughed breathlessly, shaking her head. "Don't worry," she whispered, "they're pretty tough anyway," and dutifully lifted one foot, balancing with some strain on the other. For a moment all Dean could think of was flamingos; when he tried to dislodge it, it became horses being shod. He gritted his teeth and put his brain back into his hands, feeling immediately what she'd meant about these being tough. These weren't the soft, filmy numbers he'd run up against before, the kind that tore as soon as you looked at them; the thread on these was hard as wire but incredibly smooth, so smooth that even the roughed up callouses on his palms didn't catch. They might survive the night after all.

Without her hands free to catch herself if she fell, Lucille's slight wobbling could actually be a little dangerous, so Dean carefully braced his shoulder against her hip. He managed by some minor miracle to get the first stocking up her thigh, and sexy as it might be to slide them off of a girl, there was something scandalous about sliding them on, watching the endless cross-hatching squeeze into place and airbrush out imperfections while distorting over curves like a snake swallowing prey. 

Making the clasps on the garter belt behave was something else entirely, and Lucille had to give Dean a _sotto voce_ explanation of the mechanics before he could get them in line. The frustration almost took Dean out of it entirely, but when he finally got to the one furthest back, over her bottom, he'd almost got the hang of it, and anyway, the way the strap dug into her just a little while he pulled it taught made her look positively edible, and it was all he could do not to bite into the round swell then and there.

The second stocking was better behaved, but Lucille's balance gave out, so Sam intervened, catching and pulling her bodily to sit down on his knee while Dean got to work. Dean pulled her back to her feet to do the clasps, and this time he allowed himself a nip when he had finished the last one, and Sam's eyebrows rose, curious or appreciative. Dean made sure to take a larger step back, this time, and tried not to cross his fingers too hard that Sam would ask for the corset.

It was a slightly roundabout thing to make happen. The corset had been sprung off carelessly, unloosened, and it wouldn't go back on the same way, which Sam seemed to have figured out, so Dean's first job was to undo the knots and slide the laces out to the widest they would go without slipping out of their grommets. When Sam was satisfied, Dean had to negotiate the awkward slide of it under Lucille's arms, and dealing with the rigid busk, trying to get all the posts to line up with all the clasps, was a lesson in frustration.

Lucille took mercy on him, again, when he'd managed to get half of the clasps seated for the third time and still couldn't wrangle the rest. "Come up behind me," she said, very soft.

Dean slid around behind her and nudged up against her, and she cozied back so close she was more or less grinding his dick through his jeans. Her elbows had to tuck in under his arms, to make it work, her hands flattened against his waist, so it couldn't be comfortable, but Dean for one thought it was worth it. He was so hard it hurt, and the pressure was relieving and torturous at once.

"Try from back there," she said, breathless, "push the right side in against me, and pull the left side up over it, from the center, so they're both straight, and… Up just a—yes, perfect, there. Now it should just snap—perfect." Dean felt like a gifted pupil, from the warmth in her rough voice and the way the corset was finally latched at all points. He hadn't realized these things were quite so complicated to maneuver. Still, he was always eager to learn a new skill. 

Dean didn't quite get his hands to separate from the corset, while he pulled them around to the back, just ghosted over the surface of the fabric. He shifted her slightly so that Sam could see them in profile, this time—the view from the lacing side wasn't to be missed, he thought, but he needed to be able to see Sam's face. To read Sam's cues, Dean thought. That was all.

Sam seemed to like the arrangement, and was sitting up straighter, his careless posture abandoned in favor of getting a good look. When Dean started to pull somewhat abruptly to get started, to gather enough length in the laces to grip, Sam cautioned him, "Slow," and Dean could think of nothing for a moment but how slowly you could drag a blade through flesh, how slowly you could tighten your hand on a throat. He crushed the visual of Alastair out of his mind, would never admit it had been there in the first place, but something had twisted inside and he listened to his own heartbeat pounding in his ears, silently begging Sam to talk so he wouldn't have to listen to it.

"Start again, Dean," Sam obliged, and some of the tension was back in his voice, a taut wire strong enough for Dean to hang his need on. He pulled obediently, slowly, and for his sanity's sake—if he had any sanity left to spare, anyway, this whole night was starting to suggest to him he didn't—he watched Sam more than Lucille, a little afraid that if he thought too much about how his brute strength could alter her body he might act on it. And anyway, the look on Sam's face was nothing to be missed, the intention and intensity there, the oath that he was all in written in his hard eyes and his softened mouth.

"Wait," Sam said sharply, suddenly, and Dean stopped in a heartbeat. Sam rose, then, leaning this way and that to get a different angle on the proceedings, and eventually settled on coming as close as he could without touching, using his height for the fuller aerial view. "Slow," he said again, then, and his voice was rough, and as low as Dean had ever heard it. It carried the promise of violence as easily as Dean's own body did, and of the barely-contained. Sam was holding on to something by a thread, but he was strong enough to not let it go. Dean knew on instinct that they were all safe in any way that mattered, and if he or Sam suddenly devolved into something monstrous, something soulless or animal, the other would be able to pull them back.

The memory of the nightmare of Lucy—of Sam and Dean tearing her apart on a sacrificial slab, together—butted in unwanted, then, but it only made Dean feel perversely stronger, safer in his body that was as easy as water and as hard as metal, some beautiful and terrible thing of liquid iron. He thought again of the power he had, how he could twist and pummel and break with ease, and it made the pull of the laces such a small and delicate thing by comparison, even as it slowly, inexorably squeezed the breath out of Lucille on a keening moan. Sam's breath went out of him the same, but on a whisper.

"Tell me," Dean said, dizzily.

"More," Sam obeyed, voice thin and ragged, and he was close enough that Dean could feel the heat coming off of his body. Dean gave a lurching tug, and Lucille grunted, stumbling back against Dean, but Dean just pushed her back out to arm's length. There was a shift in her posture, and then a new weight on his fists; she was leaning away, bracing for the next pull.

"Tell me, Sammy," Dean begged, and there was such a heat in his head he felt deafened and blinded, again, delirious. Sam's hand curled tight on his shoulder—Sam was bracing himself up on Dean--and his hand felt hot as a branding iron, the ghost of the handprint that had lived burned into his flesh there for two years.

"Tighter," Sam urged, and Dean obeyed, pulling until Sam choked out another, "Stop—wait," and Dean could have sworn there were heat lines in the air around the three of them, a blurring, the bending of reality around a power big as the sun. After a few heavy breaths, Sam nudged him back onward, telling him to close just an inch, and Dean did, barely breathing.

Lucille's panting had a pitch, now, with that strange rattle she'd developed under Dean the night before coming out of her throat every time she exhaled, now, a dangerous, endangered little purr. Sam braced his other hand against her back, right between her shoulderblades, and this time when he said, "More," Lucille couldn't rock back with the force of Dean's pull, couldn't mitigate the straining, and the laces slid easier, even though the resistance in her body was growing with every inch they took.

They were nearing that magical end point, where there would be no more skin to eat up between the black sides of the brocade, where the only ground to gain would be in some tiny overlap and the promise of Lucille growing so weak she would pass out beneath his hands, and suddenly Dean didn't want to stop before that point, even if he'd have to let the laces right back out so she didn't permanently suffocate. "Don't stop," he mumbled to Sam, trying to rub the sweat from his eyes off on a shoulder, but his shoulder was just as damp and hot so there was no relief.

"I won't," Sam promised stupidly, "pull—tighter, Dean," and when Dean did, he thought Sam was actually pressing Lucille _away_ at the same time, and between them they swallowed her body by fractions. "More," Sam goaded, then, and " _more,_ " until Lucille's moan broke into a gasp, until the fabric met and closed, until Dean had to switch the laces between his hands so he could drag the sides just past one another, just that tiny fraction further, until there was no tighter it could go at all.

There was a hovering moment, then, of almost silence, just their breath and Dean's pounding heartbeat, and Lucille dug her feet back under her. There were two abortive gasps, three, and Dean stared, silently goading her, until she collapsed in a soft heap, saved from a harder fall by Dean's grip on the laces letting her down slow. Sam groaned beside him, and it was so dark and hungry, Dean almost forgot to let up on the laces.

Sam came to, though, laying his hands over Dean's, easing them down close until there was enough give for the corset to come back open an inch or so, and then just a little further for good measure. "Tie them off there," Sam said, ragged, and Dean did, down on one knee over Lucille's prone form, and though he really intended to make bows, his hands went on auto-pilot and made the secure knots they knew somehow better than even tying his shoes. 

Lucille would have more room in the corset than she'd had with them up until now, but that wouldn't mean much if she wasn't breathing again on her own. Dean reached to place his knuckles under her nose, and wasn't sure he felt anything; he gave her shoulder a little shake, and after a soft sound, she gasped hard, in, then in again, jerking with surprise from the floor and panting hard.

"You're okay," Sam soothed, and she jolted again when his hand brushed her hair from her eyes, but she seemed to settle a little, then. Sam withdrew, rose and sat again in the armchair, but Dean stayed crouched, something threatening to crack inside. The place where Sam's hand had been felt cold and wrong. But Sam said it again, softly, "You're okay," and without looking Dean knew that that time it was for him, and the agitated beast inside slowed its pacing, hunkered and waited.

"Go get us water, Dean," Sam said, and there was a calmness in his voice, now, a gentling. Dean didn't think he could move his body, but it went anyway, because Sam had said so, and he fumbled around blindly in the kitchen until he found glasses, filled three from the tap. He managed to carry all three back in, setting them with a little clatter on the table, and he gave Sam his first, before even touching his own, before even crouching to give some to Lucy, who probably needed it most.

Sam thanked him softly, said something that indicated Dean should take care of her next, so Dean did, crouching with a glass and lifting her head carefully so she could sip. She was still panting, but it was less urgent, now, less imperiled, and the vague sick feeling Dean hadn't noticed coming on eased back.

"Good," Sam said, "good. Have some, too, Dean," and Dean did.

The temperature in his brain was finally coming down below the obliterated-by-fever line, and Dean sat heavily on the floor, drained. His hard-on was undiminished, but he was far from the only one in that state (Sam's jeans had been painfully distorted when he'd stood, and Lucille's thighs were slick and shining), so he consciously decided not to feel guilty about it.

"You okay?" he asked, though, because he felt human enough to need to, again.

Lucille nodded, gave him a faint, "Uh-huh" of agreement, even a shade of a smile. She closed her eyes, body slackening into something boneless, comfortable enough even with her hands locked behind her back, he guessed, so Dean patted her leg fondly.

Several minutes passed that way, with the only sound their increasingly even breathing and Sam occasionally directing Dean to give Lucille water. No one had come, everyone still seemed trapped in unreceding arousal, but Dean still felt as drained as if he'd had a marathon screw, some part of him sated by what had happened in a way he wasn't ready to examine.

"Is it terrible," Lucille whispered out of nowhere, "that part of me wishes you'd just started fucking me when I passed out?"

"No," Sam said, automatically, but there was a red tinge coming into his cheeks. Maybe he'd had the same thought. "Better to have everyone breathing, though, right?"

"Right," Lucille conceded, a little gruffly, shifting to try to—to do what, Dean wasn't sure. She wasn't making much headway, whatever it was. Sam seemed to take that as his cue, though, whatever proof he needed that everyone was basically okay, and that the show could go on.

"Dean," Sam said, and his voice had dropped back into the hard place it had been before, and it was like a lever flipped in Dean's brain, priming him to do whatever Sam might ask. Alert and ready, he discarded his glass and started to rise.

"Stay down, Dean," Sam said, before he could get his feet under him, and Dean stopped. "Get onto your knees behind her and pull her up by the hips."

There was a twinge so hot in Dean's groin that it hurt. He pitched forward to both knees, crawling to straddle Lucille's legs where they were curled off to the side, and slid his palms, steady and firm, under her hips. He pulled her up, unresisting, and only spared a moment's embarrassment that she'd probably get a little rugburn on her face and shoulders from that, since the move had pulled her back even as it pulled her up. She got her knees under her, with his help, and then she was braced there, unsteady, on her knees and shoulders and one side of her face, her hands grasping on nothing where they were resting up over her tailbone, like she were pleading with the air for something to hold onto. Finally, gravity seemed to slide her arms down, folding until her wrists stacked on the deep curve of her low back, and her fingers curled peacefully, still.

Dean's brain shorted out. The woman in front of him looked so utterly debauched, and those hips, that goddamned thick, generous ass with the stripes of garters cutting across it, were hoisted up for him in carnal promise, and the scent off of her and the gleam of her wetness and the way the lips were swollen with lust just sent him to some nether place, all pumping blood and hunger and want.

His jeans were open and rucking down his hips before Sam's voice could pierce the haze, and he didn't want to obey anymore, didn't want to listen, just wanted to mount and take and have, but then Sam was gripping the back of his neck painfully, practically shouting his name, and he whined, undignified and aching.

"What?" he snapped, when he could finally remember how to make his mouth work.

"Listen," Sam warned, and if Sam meant that to tamp him down, he'd done it wrong, because the threat in his voice tripped up Dean's spine, like it were pushing fur against the grain and waking every nerve in his skin. "Listen to me, Dean," he repeated, lower, a smooth and nebulous warning, and the fingers on Dean's neck loosened enough to let the pain fade, rubbing into the aggravation in a way that didn't quite soothe, but tamed something just enough, just barely enough. Dean closed his eyes, knowing he couldn't keep looking at the tableau in front of him and keep still, and tried to force himself to wait, to listen, to heel.

"Good," Sam said, still slowly rubbing his neck, but then there was a gentle pressure, nudging Dean down, and stiffly, Dean let himself be bowed. Only by necessity, he released the grip on one of Lucille's hips so he could brace on the ground, still not daring to open his eyes, but knowing from the scent and the feeling of heat and moisture reaching his skin that he was very, very close to his target.

"Open your eyes, Dean," Sam said, with a tone that left no room for resistance, so Dean did, and he was millimeters from her. If he just opened his mouth, licked his lips, he might brush hers incidentally. His mouth was watering.

"Steady," Sam warned, and Dean gripped at the ground and at Lucille's hip for courage. "Now taste her."

Dean felt a flare of gratitude go up like a prayer. He tipped his face just so and buried his tongue inside of her as far as he could get in one motion, not wanting to miss having done it if Sam pulled him right back off. She must have washed when she'd disappeared—she was too clean for the day and night she'd had so far—but there was no bitter tang of soap, no sour perfume, no fake floral shit or even the chemical hint that Dean's condoms sometimes left behind. She tasted like—like lamb, somehow, like girl and like sex and like nothing but pure lust. He wanted to eat her alive, in a way he'd never quite wanted to eat a girl out before. (He was happy to oblige, generally, prided himself on taking his time and doing it right so long as the taste was even generally bearable, but it hadn't ever felt like it would sustain him like food, like air before.)

"See?" Sam said, low, conspiratorial, and Dean could hear the smile in it but couldn't make sense of what he was supposed to be seeing. He just made a sound that might have been assent ( _yeah, whatever you say, Sammy_ ) and twisted his tongue around inside of her hungrily. "She tastes—" Sam began to clarify, but there was a lightning flash of memory, then, of Sam buried face first in her and stopping long enough to say how she tasted amazing, and Dean eagerly grunted his understanding and agreement, even nodding a little. 

He withdrew his tongue, to Lucille's despair if her sound was to be believed, but just so he could burrow lower, sucking the taste of her off of her clit, swirling his tongue in a greedy sweep, and she jolted beneath him. There was a high, weak sound coming from what sounded like very far away, but it was pure encouragement, lust and desperation and something pained. He swiped his tongue long and firm until he'd plunged inside again, then repeated the cycle, goaded by the changes in her cries when he changed direction and place. His whole face felt wet with her, and that scent surrounded him, felt like it was part of him, would stay with him and never wash away, and for a moment there was nothing he wanted more.

"Don't make her come," Sam instructed, and Dean and Lucille both let out sounds of anguish so comical, apparently, that Sam only barely stifled a laugh. "Yet," he amended, pacifying, "just… yet. Trust me." He withdrew his hand from Dean's neck, leaving the skin there prickling with cold and sweat and goosebumps, and settled back into the edges of Dean's peripheral vision. "Don't you want to fuck her while she's so turned on she can't see straight?" he asked, and Dean was immediately serenely happy, again, to let Sam give the orders, because that sounded like the best idea anyone had had all day. All year, maybe. 

Dean swirled his tongue on Lucille's clit like it was hard candy, flickered it fast and slow by turns, and always, always broke back away to plunge his tongue inside her, into that tight, full grip that he was suddenly having a very hard time not imagining sliding his dick into. He would keep going until Sam said otherwise, though, back on board with Sam's planning with all the zeal of the converted. He would drink her dry and do anything he could to tease and build and withdraw until Sam allowed him to sink into his reward.

Lucille's cries started to change rapidly, and when Sam called for him to stop Dean almost didn't catch it in time. Lucille's howl of frustration into the rug made clear he hadn't actually messed up, though, and the way she tried to grind her thighs together and her hips back against him was so wild and frantic he felt a little dizzy with the promise of it. She was struggling in earnest with the cuffs, now, yanking against the leather hard enough to dig red marks into her skin, and her fingers were stretching back to him in exquisite pleading, trembling with tension and need.

One of Sam's hands crossed Dean's vision, the condom packet already torn open and ready for him. There was an open jar, too, and Dean's fried synapses couldn't make sense of it, so Sam rescued him again. "They're unlubricated. You'll feel better with some of this on the inside."

Dean wasn't going to argue, but it took him a minute to get his fingers to unclasp from Lucille's hip enough to do anything about it. The marks he'd left behind there were so red and angry that they alarmed him, just a little, but it flittered to the back of his mind for the 'worry about this later' file so fast that he'd forgotten it entirely before he could get his fingers into the little pot.

It looked like Vaseline more than anything, thick and glossy and pale yellow, but there was none of the biting chemical smell or stickiness he knew to expect from that. He brought his fingers closer to his face, sniffing experimentally, and there was just a hint of something sweet, familiar but unidentifiable. It was silky and felt like a dream, so he didn't question it, just pushed his jeans the rest of the way down his thighs with the back of his hand, and slicked himself up before sheathing up. 

With the way Lucy was leaking, he was pretty sure he wouldn't need any for the outside of the condom, but just in case he'd been too thorough with his mouth, he dipped a couple fingertips back into the jar. He fisted himself carefully, twice, as clinically as he could (because he didn't want this to end like it would have back when he was 16, perfunctory and embarrassingly fast), and then stopped, waiting for the next instruction, and for some of the violence of the need to recede. He breathed deep and slow, eyes unfocused.

There was a surreal moment of silence, and Sam's fingers brushed over his cheek, through some of the borrowed wetness there. Dean turned to look without thinking, but Sam was already receding, sucking his fingertips into his mouth, eyes half-hooded and daring him to say anything at all.

Dean didn't dare. For one, it would mean having to admit to what he was watching—his brother suckling the juice of a girl from where it had smeared on Dean's cheek—and maybe even acknowledge the way it felt like a corkscrew was being driven into his body, just below the navel, to see it. But for another, it was because Sam was in charge right now, and Dean was damn well going to follow his orders without sassing back.

His eyes felt hollow and strange, then, and so did the space just beneath his sternum, and he watched, empty and hungry, waiting.

Sam's eyes closed, then, for a moment, his face blissful, and Dean wanted, wanted without aim. It must have shown on his own face—something must have—because when Sam opened his eyes, the muddy hazel-blue gone in favor of the swallowing blackness of his pupils, he pushed forward to the edge of his chair immediately, bent as far over his knees and as close to Dean as he could without joining him on the floor. His voice had the tiniest tremor in it, so small even Dean wouldn't have recognized it if he wasn't so primed to listen, to obey, to take in, and he murmured, "Fuck her for me, Dean." And then his mouth was on Dean's jaw, and he had tasted with his tongue and withdrawn like a ghost before Dean could process it.

There was a strange hanging moment, heavy with something he couldn't see, but with all the practice in the world, Dean pushed it down and dove headlong into the task at hand, desperate.

Dean had to shift his knees out a little wider around Lucille's to get himself low enough, and the denim cut into his legs and stopped him from sliding out further, but it didn't matter; less than three seconds passed between Sam telling him to do it and Dean getting all the way inside of her, feeling hard as iron buried in the tight, wet heat of her. He stopped there for two more cooling breaths, but tried to cover it by asking, "How you want it, boss?"

Sam didn't answer, at first, and a glance told Dean that he'd covered his mouth with a palm, rubbing his face, but when he recovered, Sam cleared his throat and almost—almost—sounded casual, cool. "Slow, to start."

Dean nodded and closed his eyes, drawing back long and deliberate. He waited there, tilting his hips very slightly back and forth so that just the head would twist inside of her, teasing, and she gave a little growl of urging. When he still didn't move, she gave in and tried pushing back for more contact, to get more of him inside of her, and Dean let her, but she had so little leverage at this angle, with her calves pinned under his jeans, that it didn't do her much good.

"Please," she begged finally, "please, more," and there was a short, sharp exhale beside him, so Dean obliged, sinking in with such an aching deliberateness that even if the fullness in her would be soothing, the friction would be meaningless.

"Bastard," she huffed, but her writhing was ecstatic. "Goddamn bastards, both of you… Fuck me—fucking—bastards…"

Dean boggled a little at that. "Language," he mock-scolded, but the filth felt like it was tugging directly at his balls. He laid a firm smack on her flank, anyway, and she spasmed on him while she let out a yelp that sagged into a moan.

 _Damn._ What was it about redheads?

He gave her one more half-hearted swat, just to feel her squeeze around him, and began to move unhurriedly, savoring and sweet and as deep as he could.

Lucy's strange, sickly purr started coming out of her every time he landed, like all the air was being wrung out of her by Dean's body. The sheer obscenity of her body beneath him, her weight rocking into her breasts and face and shoulders, her hips canted up high and eager, and that strange animal sound, weak and uncontrolled, was making it increasingly hard to stay focused, to keep everything slow. Sam must have been able to read it in the way he closed his eyes too tight, or stuttered with his hips, because there was a soft touch on his shoulder to get his attention, and Sam was giving him a time-out gesture. Dean thought he was going to choke on it, but he ground to a halt, seated flush against Lucille, and managed to look over at Sam, eyes blurry but attentive.

"Pull her up into your lap," Sam said, and he seemed to have lost the capacity to fake calm. Or maybe just to fake it well enough to fool Dean. To Dean, the hunger in Sam's voice was clear as day, and Dean did what he was told, bowing his body over Lucille's and wrapping one arm under her waist, the other across her shoulders. When he sat back up and Lucille's weight speared her down somehow further onto him, she let out a cry that was almost a squeal (bizarre to hear when everything else that came out of her mouth was so low and rough). He squeezed her against him tight, tight enough to constrict, to control her movement, and she let out another animal sound, throwing her head back against his shoulder and seeming to pulse with her thwarted attempts at motion.

Another sharp exhale from Sam—this one with just a hint of pitch, the ghost of a groan—and Dean guessed this was working for him. Hell if it wasn't working for Dean, too. Someone even pretending to want to get away from him had never been a turn-on, before (unless you counted the way his body responded to chasing monsters); it seemed like it should hurt his pride, even, since being wanted was the best part—the very best part—of the conquest. But something here had gone sideways; some essential boundary had blurred, where this girl was now half lay and half prey, and the struggle to keep her here was making his gears grind so loud it was hard to think. And there was no way it could damage his pride, here; Lucille might be trying, in theory, to mount an escape, bucking against the restraint of his body, but there was a whispered stream of filth coming out of her, of _"Fuck,"_ and _"Yes,"_ and _"Fuck yes!"_

"Turn—" Sam guttered, barely clear, cleared his throat. "Turn towards me."

That turned out to be harder than expected. When Dean was clearly struggling with maneuvering them, about to trip himself on his own jeans, Sam abruptly rose and got behind them. With more pats and grunts than any clearer direction, Sam managed to help Dean get his jeans the rest of the way off, hurled well clear, and Dean hadn't realized just how constraining they'd been until he was free. Now, though it was still awkward to move both their bodies at once, on his knees, it was something he could accomplish, even relishing the effort, and the way the lurching motions made Lucy startle and grip on him, tight and desperate and unexpected, was sending him out of his head.

As soon as he had them near enough faced towards Sam (who had dropped back into the chair), Dean called it good enough and caught his breath. He had to clutch tight at Lucy who seemed to quickly be realizing that, awkward though the new position was, she had some leverage to move herself on Dean, and she was intent on using it. 

Sam was right; out of her mind with the desperation to come, Lucille was wild and half feral. While Dean had tried so hard to avoid eye contact earlier on the loveseat, he was looking right at Sam, now, and could imagine what Sam was seeing—his brother on his knees, this writhing redheaded minx coiled in his grip like Dean were a snake, her breasts starting to come unevenly loose from the top of her corset and her knees pinned together tight between Dean's knees while she dug for an orgasm with the swiveling of her hips and the crushing of her thighs. 

Dean was holding still by sheer force of cussed will. He stared at Sam, hard, and waited.

Sam closed his eyes, covered his mouth, like something would escape if he didn't hold it down. There was a breath so deep it made Sam's shoulders lift, but then Sam swallowed and nodded and opened his eyes. "Carry on," he said, but his voice was thin and pained. 

Dean guessed that wasn't the only part of him in pain, and winced in sympathy at the sight of Sam's jeans. He wasn't going to waste a lot of time worrying about that, though—Sam was a big boy and could take care of himself, and now Dean had the go-ahead.

"Still slow?" he asked, and it sounded like his throat was full of sandpaper.

Sam shook his head, not quite up for vocalizing again, apparently. Dean sighed his relief, and jerked his hips upward, he and Lucille groaning in tandem.

Lucille was whispering, "Yes, yes, yes," and "please, more, _yes_ …" again, but it was punctuated with sharp yowls, now, and she was curling her fingers hard where they were pinned between their bodies, biting into Dean's middle with her nails. Her hips were positively gyroscopic, her chest was heaving against the brackets of Dean's arms, and her hair was tickling him every time her head lolled carelessly on his shoulder. Dean's eyes weren't really focusing well, any more, but he still found Sam now and then, in soft-focus but taut as a bowstring, and sometimes he saw Lucille's nipples riding the lace edge of her corset, or the hypnotic pattern of the fishnet on her thighs. Sometimes he saw nothing, the world a blur of color and heat.

The purple marks all over Lucille's white shoulder and throat were swimming as she roiled beneath him, and Dean had to make them still by adding another, biting down and sealing his mouth over it, suckling her skin while the leather collar pressed against his cheek, smooth and hard. She keened—really keened, a wail of need and aching—and then she did something with her hips that was just for her, he thought, something that shortened Dean's thrusts but made them strike gold, if her panting was to be believed. He could allow that; it wasn't as good for him as bottoming out, but if he could get her to come on his dick, again, that would more than make up for it.

It took all the power of whatever brain cells Dean still had firing, but he pried his arm loose from Lucille's waist, and wedged his knees out wider, so he could find the space to slide the pad of his middle finger down between the folds of her. He couldn't get too precise—she wasn't really unlocking her knees, even with the room to—but she seemed close enough that precision wasn't going to really be much of an issue. He alternated biting her neck and biting his own tongue, to try to hold himself back from the brink, determined— _determined_ —to get her there ahead of him, because Dean was a goddamned gentleman, for all that he was also some kind of violent beast, but it was going to be a narrow thing.

"Good," Sam encouraged, and Dean tried to look up at him without letting go of the flesh between his teeth, little though his eyes wanted to do the work. There was something hard in Sam's expression, something hungry that sharpened when Dean looked at him, and Dean felt it on the inside, too, a mirror. Seeing it reflected, feeling it reflecting, made a strange echo chamber, and it built into something potent, something pure as the endless twilit rush of thrashing through Purgatory. There was nothing else, then, nothing but his body and this girl and his brother, nothing but need and hunger and then the obliterating crash of satiation.

Someone was screaming distantly, or maybe howling, and the arm Dean was holding across Lucille's shoulders reluctantly shifted, his palm fumbling up until Lucille's mouth was covered. The wailing muffled. 

Dean was not ready to have his brain turn over yet, but whatever mechanism had let the one hand take care of the sound was able to pull his other hand—which felt like it was buzzing, for some reason—out of Lucille's lap, and the muffled wailing settled into sucking, sobbing breaths against his palm. Dimly, Dean registered that there were spasms kicking on and off around his dick, staccato and random. It must have started a while ago—he thought vaguely it had helped push him over the edge—but it was so subsumed under the feeling of the hunt it had been just one more blur of information on his skin. How long had Lucille been coming, he wondered?

Well, long enough to make her start screaming in his lap. Not long enough to make Sam feel the need to take mercy. Probably that was the right amount of time, he figured.

Dean felt soaked, where he was joined with Lucy. Odd combinations of hot and cold, chills and sweat and heat, were coming over his skin in waves and patches, but there was a delicious feeling, better than the afternoon's hot bath, where he was softening inside of her. The heat and fullness of her made it almost feel like the two of them were reversed, his the vulnerable flesh, hers the firm and penetrating. He didn't want to leave. He didn't want to think. He wanted to just fall asleep like this, to sink down and be subsumed completely inside of it, inside of her, feeling like she were somehow inside of him, and with the unaccountable feeling of safety overall, of being protected. If the intense and glittering watchfulness in Sam's eyes had something to do with it, Dean didn't put it together.

One of his knees made a threatening cracking sound, and Dean had to shift; first to one hip, then to that hip and an elbow, then over on his side in a collapse. He managed somehow to take Lucille down with him, without, apparently, doing any damage (his hold on her had adjusted automatically to "protect the civilian" mode). He did, disappointingly, slide out of her when they hit the floor, and he cursed at the onslaught of comparatively cold air. The only thing for it was the burrow forward, burying himself in the cleft of her bottom and pressing his thighs flush to hers.

He was halfway gone when a raspy voice cut into his reverie. "You're awful sweet to cuddle, but maybe you want to undo the cuffs for me first?"

"Let me get that," Sam said, from somewhere above. "You done for now?" he asked, and Dean didn't think he had to answer, thought it should be pretty obvious, but then Lucille spoke instead, and, well, maybe that's who Sam had been talking to. Must mean he could just let go, then, get settled.

"I could rally if you had something in mind," she was saying, and Sam's hands were between them, brushing Dean's belly, and it tickled, so he snickered and pushed at him with an elbow to make him stop.

"Just trying to get the cuffs unhooked, Dean," Sam said patiently, and when the hand left his belly, another brushed over his hair in some kind of tenderness. Dean smiled to himself. The world was warm and nice, just now.

It tilted with resistance for a moment, and he had to loosen his bearhug while Lucille worked her arms free and out in front of her, out of the circle of his arms. She felt for an instant like she was going to try to get loose, and Dean felt a pang of loss, but then she stilled, settled, and a pillow was shoving up under his head. That, _that_ felt like Heaven. 

Dean let one arm off of Lucille just long enough to reach out, to fumble until he found one of Sam's legs. He gave it a fond clap, just to prove to himself Sam was still there, then wound back around his hot, human body pillow, and crashed hard. The last thing he felt was a hand settling heavy on his knee, solid and reassuring.


	8. Chapter 8

Dean was dreaming of voices. 

Sam was whispering _Thank you, thank you, thank you,_ amidst a blur of wet and rustling sounds, but then it was a river, instead, and he floated away, safe. 

There was a bar, one of those high end ones with strange lights, where only the clinking of glasses and muffled conversations could be heard, no jukebox or pool cues or barfights. Lucille was there, and she was telling him to just _Stay a few more days, maybe he'd be ready by then, what could it hurt?_ and he wanted to say _Yes, please, yes, ready for what?_ but someone else was arguing, and it faded into drink orders at the bar, someone ordering all the cocktails with dirty names that Dean could remember and some that existed only in the dream and would evaporate on waking, however hard Dean tried to recall them.

 _Oh, no, no, get back here…_ Lucille was scolding. _If anyone's going to sit on that sweet face it's going to be Sam._ There was a muffled curse, and Lucille was pulling some slender, beautiful woman away from Dean, then, and that was a crime. She tickled his nose with her feather boa before she left, though, and Dean, sneezing, totally got her number.

_Should we wake him?—He'll be so mad if we do.—He'll be mad if he wakes up in agony after a whole night on the floor, too, won't he?—Yeah, maybe, maybe…—Here, let me just…_

Dean woke up with Lucille nestling into his arms, brushing kisses over his jaw. His left shoulder and hip were screaming at him, from where he was lying on them, and the pain just grew right along with his consciousness. He groaned, all misery.

"I was having a good dream," he grumbled, though Lucille, naked and warm in his arms was nice to wake up to. He just needed off that shoulder. Though he was barely awake enough for a maneuver this complicated, he rolled up on top of her, bracing up at least some of his weight on his knees and elbows, and she made a startled sound beneath him.

"Morning," he said, sleepily, and kissed her, realizing halfway there that his mouth tasted foul, but she put up with it for a minute anyway.

"Only about 2 a.m.," she said, "just thought you might want to sleep on the bed, instead of the floor."

"Who says I want to sleep?" Dean asked, but she laughed, maybe because his eyes were most of the way closed again. 

"Come on, up," she said. "We'll all fit in my bed. Snug, but it's a cold night."

As though it were strictly the result of her telling him so, like in a cartoon, Dean felt the air all at once, the chill and the draft of it. Suddenly, naked on the floor seemed like a significantly less welcoming place than under a blanket, on a mattress, and he reluctantly staggered up.

Someone had taken care of the condom for him, and cleaned him up besides. He wished he'd been awake for that one. 

"So, you want to be in the middle this time?" she asked, her tone sly and dirty even after everything.

And the thing was, some part of him did. But that wouldn't do.

"Nah, Sam's got cold feet. Huge, cold feet. And he steals the blankets."

Lucille was giving him one of those too-perceptive looks.

"What? When we were kids in motel rooms, sometimes we had to share the bed if our Dad was in the other one." Dean shrugged, and let her palm a toothbrush—still in its original packaging, thank God—on him as she guided him through the bedroom to the sink. "He had big feet, even then. He was like a puppy, you know how you can tell how they're gonna' be huge because their ears and paws are too big for the rest of them?"

"Very funny, Dean," Sam sad, from back in the bedroom.

Dean brushed his teeth; he thought he was the last one, because there were two other brushes still dripping in a cup near the sink.

"Water with aspirin in it," Lucille said, when he was finished, handing him a cup.

"Aspirin? I don't need—"

"—You will," she said stubbornly, "you put away more than I did, and that's saying something."

Dean grumbled some kind of assent and drank it down quickly. It tasted weird, but at least it slaked some of that waking-up-halfway-to-hungover thirst.

"Your brother found you some diphenhydramine, too."

Dean refilled the empty glass from the sink. "He what now?" 

"For your allergies," she said, "it's on the vanity, there. I'm assuming the cats'll leave the bed alone with you two here, and I changed out the bedding, but they're still around."

"Maeve has already been up twice," Sam admitted. He was sitting on one side of the bed.

"She's the most persistent and the least shy," Lucille said, but her look to Dean was a little embarrassed. "Sam can take whichever side she was on."

Sam indicated he was already there, and slid in, taking up an absurdly narrow patch of bed, an inch from falling off. He was completely naked. Dean tried to put that out of mind, and considered going to get some shorts to sleep in, but Lucille was naked, too, and three people in the bed under the blanket would be risking a sauna already, even without any extra fabric.

"Who's the little spoon?" Lucille asked lasciviously, while she crawled in to the center.

"Sam," said Dean, teasing on pure reflex. He took the Benadryl with the whole glass of water, because he had the luxury. He'd dry-swallowed more pills than he ever wanted to think about, and most of them burned.

"Sounds good to me," she said, rolling toward Sam and nudging him until he gave up on his martyric plank impression and curled on his side toward the wall. "We'll fit better if we all sort of snuggle up," she said, and it was a weak impression of innocence at best, but Dean was sure it was true. Three people couldn't all fit side by side on their backs in that thing with any space between them. On their sides, stacked like silverware, at least they'd be able to breathe without falling out. 

Lucille pulled the cord on the lamp and nestled back down in the sudden dark. Only a little awkwardly, Dean climbed in behind her, spooning up close enough to wrap an arm around her waist and press his groin up against her bottom. The other arm was harder to deal with, but he eventually found a position where it wasn't (hopefully) going to fall asleep without him, or jab anyone in the head with an elbow. 

"Would you quit squirming, Dean?" Sam asked, impatient, but not very. Dean took advantage of his arm being between Lucille and Sam and flicked Sam, hard, along the spine. Sam muttered something, but Lucille folded her arm _over_ Dean's, to deter him from repeating the action. One of her legs pulled away, and Dean was sure she was connecting with Sam with it; something about that was primordially soothing, the knowledge of their connection in space and time and sleep.

Dean fell hard asleep in moments, and didn't dream of voices.

***

There was a small, round, brass alarm clock on the bedside table, but Dean woke when the rooster started in, sometime a little before dawn. He wasn't sure where he was; that wasn't a particularly strange sensation for him, but he couldn't see anything familiar (like his room at the bunker, or like the inside of the Impala) or anything with the anonymous sameness of a motel room (like stained once-white blinds, an ancient HVAC unit, the table common to 2/3rds of all motel rooms). He saw an old-fashioned alarm clock, the outline of a stained glass lamp, a chest, an armoire, a casement window open a few inches onto clean, cold air, with no bars and no parking lot and no streetlamp on the other side. This was a home. This was a bedroom. This was a place someone lived, and intended to keep living, and there was no gun under the pillow.

The rooster crowed again, and someone murmured grumpily behind him, and understanding slotted into place. The memories of the last two days filled in the holes, and then made him feel warm, though part of that was the arms draped over him.

Arms. Too many arms. Dean shifted carefully, taking inventory; that one was his… That one was Lucille's… 

At some point in the night, everything had flipped. Dean was lying on his opposite side, and apparently everyone had followed. Lucille had curled up against him, and her breath was warm down on the middle of his back somewhere, her arm around his waist. Sam had, presumably, chased her, and one of his impossibly long arms was now stretched across all of them, heavy.

Oh, Dean would never let him live this one down. He wished he knew where his phone was, so he could snap a selfie for the proof.

He realized pretty quickly the downsides of that, and thought maybe it was best, after all, if he just slipped out and tried not to wake anyone. He was still a little stoned on Benadryl, though, and the part of his shoulder he'd exposed in shifting promised the air was colder than he was expecting (who slept with the window open in January?), and even with the water and aspirin he did have the start of a headache behind his eyes. All in all, pride and masculine necessity aside, he decided his best bet was to stay right where he was, and hope the rooster would shut up long enough that he could grab another hour before they'd have to head back to the real world of monsters and angels and demons.

Tugging the sheet and blanket back over his shoulder, he remembered what Lucille had said the night before—something about cracking the bones and sucking the marrow of life. Maybe grasping for one more hour of sleep in a bed with a hot girl and his brother was a low bar to set for marrow, but he'd take it.

***

They were almost through the Sierra Nevadas when Sam (who Dean had let drive _to be nice,_ and not because his hangover was worse) deigned to speak. "Gave her our numbers. Well—one for each of us. Didn't figure you'd mind."

"Nah," Dean said, looking out the side window rather than let his face betray his pleasure. He could be cool about this—totally cool. He could even pretend he hadn't told Lucy that if the craft fair circuit ever called her out to the Plains that she should give them a call to meet up. Instead, he said, "Knowing her, she'll probably wind up in another haunting in the next couple years or so. Otherwise, hell, I guess I wouldn't mind hoppin' the mountains next time we go to the Vegas."

"Me, neither," Sam said, exceedingly sensibly and calmly. Dean didn't believe the calm for even a minute.

"You dog," he said, grinning. 

"You'd better watch out, though," Sam said, all mock seriousness, "she said if we came back for Halloween she'd want to take us out to see the _Rocky Horror Picture Show._ Something about dressing you up?" he added, vaguely, and Dean felt a little heat under his collar. "I'm sure with the, uh, whole fishnet thing you've got going that you'd be very happy going as Frank."

"Which one's he?" Dean asked, trying to picture it. He'd seen it, a million years ago, but it was a blur, now, nothing he'd liked well enough at the time to pursue it again. But if it was something Lucille thought he'd like dressing up for…

"Frank is the, ah, 'Sweet Transvestite,'" Sam said, not repressing his smirk well enough. "You know, Tim Curry in the corset and fishnets and pearls."

"Oh, but Sammy, you'd just be so damn pretty in a string of pearls," Dean said, generous to a fault.

Sam rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, now. "Sure, Dean. And you can just go in the gold speedo as the grunting muscle man, better?"

"Rocky," Dean grunted, remembering.

"They both make it with Susan Sarandon," Sam said, again sounding far too sensible. 

"Sounds like a plan, then," Dean said, just as sensibly. 

Maybe if they weren't busy come October, they could just come see what this part of the world was like for Halloween.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to anyone who made it to the end! I hope it was worth your while. Please drop me a note to let me know - I am absolute trash for comments and enjoy talking about this way too much. I also love questions and theories.
> 
> I have a finished draft of Soulless's time in Stockton and Columbia; if that's something you'd be interested in seeing, let me know that, too. (I am also trash for Soulless, and for Demon!Dean; his turn is only about 3/4 written.)
> 
> Yes, there is more to Lucille than she lets on. I've scattered in hints (but also some red herrings), and if you figure it out I'll probably love you forever. It'll come out in due time.
> 
> I will figure out how to make a public playlist of the smut soundtrack, eventually. And because Sam as Frank N. Furter is too delicious to contemplate, and Lucille is a babe, there'll probably have to be some art, too.
> 
> Miscellanea: The temperature stamps are accurate to the places and dates/times, because I am insane, apparently. Yes, there is a college campus on the site of a haunted insane asylum in Stockton, and they in fact in one case moved the markers but not the bodies, though there haven't been any violent incidents reported so far. The Fallon ghosts are more or less reported to be as described, with a minor embellishment, and of course with the addition of an angry Abigail. There are four saloons in Columbia, though the one Lucille works is an amalgam of two (one of which does have the 'pickpockets and loose women' sign).


End file.
